Thomas Edmund's Reviews > The Wings Upon Her Back

This is one of those weird reviews (or just a weird reviewer I guess LOL) where I don't really have a good sense for the book as a whole. Basically I quite enjoyed it, but have a series of +ve and -ve comments to make and am hoping that just listing them all out will produce a useful review as I can't really capture the book in its entirely.

I think that comes from my first bugbear: that the story is written across two timelines. The first, where the story begins, is our Winged MC Zenya provides a small mercy for character found to be in violation of strict religious law - and then finds herself instead under the gaze of harsh judgement.

The second basically follows Zenya's lifestory, and basically how she found herself eventually 'winged' in the first - but the main gist of the backstory detailing and explaining the tyrannical setup of the world she lives in.

(its with not small irony to note that most of the story is about Zenya not actually having wings as its almost all before and after)

Anyway this juxtaposition of timelines created quite a number of challenges for the story. At the most basic I felt there wasn't enough grounding in each timeline to instantly recognize where we were. There was any number of times that I actually got confused and had to flick ahead or back to check where we were, there wasn't really a strong sense within Zenya or the setting in general to distinguish between the two, nor something majorly symbolic in the setting or otherwise.

The second more thematic problem with the two timelines is they sort of undermined each other. A lot of Zenya's character was (skilfully) revealed in the opening scenes - her entire backstory doesn't really give us much new other than putting "Fact" to the feelings we already have. While the backstory did contain a lot of world-building, GOOD worldbuilding btw, my feeling was the backstory timeline could have been much abridged to a few action and 'setpiece' heavy scenes that gave us a sense of the history, not an entire narrative.

My other critiques of this book is that their simply isn't a lot of characterization, or narrative and thematic develop of other characters. Given that the story is about being disillusioned with one's Gods (among others) it seems like a story ripe for a variety of characters or more importantly their responses to the strict religious world they live in. And technically they are there, they just don't get a tonne of screen-time or much development. It was confusing because in both timelines Zenya as a sort of 'team' around her but in neither was there enough material on minor characters that I can explicitly bring to mind anything about them.

However that all sounds super negative - here are some of the GREAT things about The Wings Upon her Back.

The World itself is super intriguing and interesting. The Gods are "real" in this book and directly intervene in people's lives (or do they?) the interplay of this creates a huge amount of tension and drive for the story and its great. While I did critique some elements of the worldbuilding in the above paragraphs what World was Built in this book was awesome and so interesting to read about.

In fact I give this a double bonus because some of the reveals towards the end about said Gods and the theology were just brilliant in the way the mythology interacting with the action of Zenya and her Antagonist - I don't want to spoil too much but the way it plays out is well done.

Finally the villain of this story really played out disturbingly realistically, in terms of having a very toxic relationship with Zenya - how that relationship impacted our MC, and as above how it tied into everything that went on. There were moments where the story almost sounded a bit like a psychological thriller in terms of the mind games.

So yeah in conclusion I'm not actually sure how to capture this book as a whole. It has some great bits, some less than, some flaws - a bit like life really!!