Wings

Wings
Aprilynne Pike
240 pages
Publisher: HarperTeen
Source: Free NookBook
★★☆☆☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

Warning: sarcastic spoilers to follow.

An overly simplistic plot.  That's what's going on in this novel.  Perhaps it was a little more young than the normal YA I read and it would be a good novel for a fourth grader, I think.  Definitely not the kind of high school YA I enjoy.  But I digress.

Laurel is starting a new school (gasp) and when she goes to bio (double gasp) she meets a boy (triple gasp) and they become fast friends.  Unoriginal plot: girl goes to new school, goes to bio class, meets a boy.  Why can't someone write about physics class for once?  Oh, I digress again.  She's also growing something out of her back.  At first she thinks it's a tumor but decides not to tell anyone - because that's the logical thing to do, right?  Tumors usually just go away by themselves.  But, you see, it's not a tumor.  It's a blossom.  She's growing a giant flower right out of her spine.

Gross.  She and her new boy-friend are in awe of it's beauty, but I'm sorry, a human growing a plant out of their body is gross.  Oh, but then we find out that she's not human at all... she's actually a plant.  That actually makes the blossom a little less gross, but still... kind of unpleasant to think about.  Anyway, it turns out Laurel is a faerie and that's why she's technically a plant.  Aprilynne Pike completely rewrote what it is to be a faerie and her descriptions didn't quite make sense to me.

Here's the major problem I have with this novel: the title.  It's called Wings, so you would expect there to be wings in the novel.  However, Pike makes it a point to note that what's growing out of Laurel's back are not wings at all, but actually petals.  If there are no wings, why call the book Wings?

Even though this is a trilogy (what's with all the YA trilogies these days?) I enjoyed the fact that Wings didn't end on a major cliffhanger.  I didn't get the feeling that I had to read the next book in order to find out what happens next.  Don't get me wrong, I have no idea what happens next, but I guess... I don't really care.  I will not actively try to acquire the next two in the series.  I think a young girl in late elementary or middle school would enjoy this novel a lot more than I did.