Book Review: Wings by Aprilynne Pike

Krispy downloaded this for free on her Kindle and like the masochistic fool that I am, I read it. Pressing my eyes to a belt-sander would not be enough to cleanse them of this travesty of a book.

Wings by Aprilynne Pike

Pros: Reading it is a cheap alternative to undergoing lobotomy.
Cons: You probably don't want to be lobotomized.

Intellectual Rating: 0 out of 10 stars
Emotional Grade: F

Book Blurb: (from Goodreads) Laurel was mesmerized, staring at the pale things with wide eyes. They were terrifyingly beautiful—too beautiful for words.

Laurel turned to the mirror again, her eyes on the hovering petals that floated beside her head. They looked almost like wings.

In this extraordinary tale of magic and intrigue, romance and danger, everything you thought you knew about faeries will be changed forever.

Alz's Take: I cannot describe how bad this book is. The writing is puerile, the story is 100% teenage wish-fulfillment, Laurel is Mary Sue to the max, and I honestly cannot believe this book got published. This is the level of writing and story I expected from Twilight, which ended up exceeding my expectations; Wings undercut my expectations exponentially.

Even other books that I've rated F (Nightshade and Crescendo) were better-written than Wings. At least they more or less adhered to the old show-don't-tell adage, whereas Wings is bent on doing the opposite: Tell, don't show! Showing is boring and requires more thought and actual work! Just tell! Also symmetry is key to goodness and if you are asymmetrical you are ugly and therefore evil because evolution screwed up on you! Haha!

I paraphrase but do not exaggerate. That is something that comes up in the book.

Being that it is now quite late because Krispy and I didn't have a blog planned for today, and I just don't have it in me to write up an in-depth review, I'll just give you a partial summary of what happens in the book. Be warned that there are SPOILERS of a sort forthcoming—in the vein of it's a spoiler for Twilight that Edward is a vampire and vampires sparkle in the sun.

Meet Laurel: She's your average fifteen-and-a-half-year-old girl who's been homeschooled by her doctor-phobic hippie parents all her life and is now attending public high school. She literally lives on Sprite and fruit and vegetables.

One day Laurel discovers a tiny bump between her shoulder blades. She is horrified that it is a zit since she is beautiful and perfect and looks like a teenage model on TV and has never had a zit before in her life on her translucent skin and also her hair is magically delicious and doesn't require washing with shampoo because it just takes care of itrself and Laurel moves with the grace of a dancer despite never having taken lessons.

Where was I? Oh yes. The zit.

Laurel decides to wear her hair down and cover the hideous bump up with a shirt. But over the course of the next two or three days, the zit grows to the size of a golf ball.

Laurel does not show her parents because she knows that most things in the human body take care of themselves and go away on their own if you ignore them. When the weekend arrives (so by this point it's been three or four days) and the thing is now the size of a softball, she decides that if the bump's not gone by Monday, she'll tell her parents!

Sunday dawns and the bump is gone. But what is this that has taken its place?

Laurel naturally is horrified and decides that the first and most important thing to do is…hide the fact that she has a flower growing out of her back from her parents.

After stupid incredibly clichéd stuff occurs (i.e. chopping off the tip of a petal—eek! ow! hurty!—and taking it to her new boyfriend David because he has a microscope and is therefore a science nerd and can tell her what's going on, and he tells her it's a bit of flower because it has plant cells, and my brain is beginning to disintegrate right now from the horror of trying to coherently remember this), Laurel returns to the cabin in the woods where her family originally lived, frolics in the forest while her sweet-smelling blossom blows in the breeze, and runs into Tamani, who is a guy who we later find out has been stalking her ever since she was born.

Green-haired and generically hot Tamani tells Laurel the shocking, shocking truth:

Which incidentally is supposed to explain why she lives on Sprite and fruit and vegetables, because flowers in a vase of water with a spoonful of sugar added live longer, although I like to think that eating exclusively fruits and veggies makes Laurel a cannibal.

To explain the pollen thing, we have to jump ahead to Laurel's second meeting with Tamani. See, she was so shocked to find out she was a plant that first time that she ran off, and afterward noticed some gold dust on her wrist from where Tamani grabbed her. Next time she asks him about it—oooh, faerie dust!—only for him to explain no, that's not faerie dust, it's pollen.

Pollen.

Because males only produce pollen when they are around a female in bloom, and yes, he could have pollinated her—not that he would have, of course, oh no, which is why he told her that first time that he knew whose blossom his hands could get into and whose not. That wasn't just a disturbing metaphor. It was a literal description because faeries are plants and therefore reproduce by pollination. He could have pollinated her bloom, which would have produced a seed, which could be planted in the ground to grow into a baby faerie.

But don't worry, Tam tells Laurel, pollination is for reproduction but sex is for fun!

…okay, that's it. I didn't even get into the trainwreck of how David is super hot and super in love with Laurel for no particular reason and the "plot" concerning the faerie world of Avalon and how my medical student friend went LOLWHUT over the description of Laurel's father's treatment when he ends up in the hospital due to the nefarious never-explained scheming of the asymmetrically evil trolls and—

I can't stand it anymore.

Alz's Conclusion: Don't read Wings. Just—just don't. Please. Spare yourself. It's badly written stylistically and narratively, with a heroine who has all the pluck and strength and character of single sheet of bargain-brand tissue, and, and, and if you, like Krispy, downloaded this for free onto your Kindle, you might as well delete it and download something more worthwhile. Or even if you don't download anything else, that's fine. A lobotomy is preferable to Wings. At least then you'd be unable to read it.