Wings - Aprilynne Pike

Summary: Laurel was mesmerized, staring at the pale things with wide eyes. They were terrifyingly beautiful--to 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.

This extraordinary tale of magic and intrigue, romance, and danger, everything you thought you knew about faeries will be changed forever.
(summary from book jacket - photo from amazon.com)

My review: I didn’t know that this was LDS fiction when I read it. I suspected, when I got to the end, and saw that Pike was from Idaho and was now living in Utah her hubbie and 3 kids. Am I stereotyping? Absolutely—but I’m also right. I googled. Like I’ve said, LDS authors come from a smaller pool of writers and, with the high demand (in the LDS world) for clean fiction, things sometimes get published that maybe, well, wouldn’t ordinarily be picked up by another publisher.

However, I am totally impressed with Aprilynne Pike. She held her own in the sea of fantasy YA fiction that is currently on the market, managing to write an engaging, and inventive faerie-tale that has a great deal of potential. While I didn’t find the story compelling in a grown-up sense, I think that a younger reader would thoroughly enjoy themselves. Pike definitely puts a new spin on things. I never expected that Laurel would be what she was in the biological sense and I appreciated all the little details that she created to make that character different.

I enjoyed the love triangle she created. Any good romantic novel has to have a little bit of conflict and though one guy definitely had more sizzle than the other, I felt she did a good job of creating tension without actually taking the characters anywhere inappropriate for young readers.

That having been said, I didn’t feel a strong pull to the “David” side of things. This is in part because I couldn’t stop picturing David Archuleta, which pretty much ruined him as a romantic character for me (sorry David). However, I think that might work in her favor with a younger audience though as I understand he’s all the rage in the 'tween set. I think she could have done more with David in order make Laurel’s decision that much harder.

There were a few awkward situations where the term “flower” could have had a double meaning, though I highly doubt it was intended. Maybe I’m just dirty minded. I don’t know. It’s a side-effect of being married to my husband, I guess.

Overall, this book ended just as I started to really get into it. I will definitely pick up the next one to see how the story progresses before I decide just how much I like the series.

My rating: 4 Stars (for YA Genre). I think there was one swear word in the entire book.

Sum it up in one phrase: I’m interested to see where this goes….