Author: Aprilynne Pike
I started reading Wings at about 6:30 this morning. It's not a long book (290 pages, with large type), and even though I cleaned up a massive waterfall caused by an overflowing toilet (don't ask), went on an eight-mile run, and did the normal mom stuff of making lunches and driving to and from schools, I managed to finish the book by about 1pm. It had me hooked. As I read, I kept thinking to myself, "This has got to be the clear-cut YA winner; it's a great story, good characters, interesting writing, and it's definitely hooked me as a reader." Then I sat down with the list of finalists in front of me and realized that it's not even nominated in the YA category, despite being published by HarperTeen.
Before I talk about the book, I want to say this:
supernatural elements + teen protagonist= Eyes Like Mine (general category)
supernatural elements + teen protagonist= Wings (speculative fiction category)
supernatural elements + teen protagonist= My Fair Godmother (YA category)
Gosh I'm confused. I know that teen protagonists don't automatically make the book Young Adult. I can think of plenty of examples of great fiction (The Secret Life of Bees, To Kill a Mockingbird, half of Dickens) with teenage characters that aren't geared toward a teenage audience. But with ample descriptions of first love and high school life in both, I would say that both Wings and Eyes Like Mine are squarely teen. If Wings falls in the speculative category, then why doesn't Fablehaven? Both books have fifteen-year-old female protagonists who have special relationships with fairies.
I really enjoyed Wings. My daughter, on the other hand, is annoyed by it, both by the title and by the premise. Apparently she read a similar book a few months ago, also called Wings, written by ED Baker, where the main character, like Laurel in Pike's book, started to grow fairy wings. Pike does a great job getting teen relationships right, constructing Laurel's character, and working through both the suspense elements and Laurel's transformation from "girl" to fairy.
3 comments:
Shelah, I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with the fact that no book can be double nominated, or placed in more than one category. (No book can win more than once, either. So whichever book gets voted "Best Novel of the Year" will no longer be eligible to win its own category. Same with "Best New Novel.") So the Whitney voters who made up the list of finalists had to decide where they were going to put each book, and that resulted in some disparities. That's just my guess, though.
I liked Wings. I loved the idea of faeries as plants. But it's so hard to compare it to the other speculative fiction books. It's light, it's YA, and it's just totally different from the other books in its category, all of which have quite a bit more darkness (and depth, in some cases) to them. I'm really interested to see what you think of Serial Killer and Warbreaker.
And that's exactly why I think it works better in the YA category than in the speculative fiction category. I think it would be a serious contender as a YA novel. Although I haven't read the other spec fiction books (actually, I'm scared of them), I've gleaned from the covers (not to mention what you've said here) that Wings will be the lightweight among them. And that's where I think it's done a disservice by being in the other category.
I agree that it would do better in the other category. I don't understand how they decided which books would go where. I think that readers have to nominate it for a given category, as well, and maybe that played into it--it could be that Wings was nominated in speculative fiction but not in YA fiction. Or maybe it was nominated in YA but the YA judges didn't like it.
It would be nice to know the inside scoop on how all of this happens.
I might start the other speculative fiction books with Warbreaker. For me (but I'm a geek that way) it was a pageturner --it's huge but it read really fast. I stayed up till two a.m. reading an early version of it on Brandon Sanderson's website while I had my broken leg.
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