This book was okay. I the world building confused me but i eventually grew to the like the characters. It way it was written was not as strong as i would like. I will read the sequel. I did like the 2 perspectives though. ( )

This book was okay. I the world building confused me but i eventually grew to the like the characters. It way it was written was not as strong as i would like. I will read the sequel. I did like the 2 perspectives though. ( )

DNF. As I could not stand the main character

Aza Ray Boyle has been practically drowning her whole life. Suffering from a lung disease so rare that she's the only known case in the world, she lives her life in and out of hospitals, never knowing how long she has to live, with no cure or relief in sight. At least she has her family and her best friend Jason, an extremely gifted young man who has stuck by her side for years. One day, as she approaches her sixteenth birthday, she spots a strange image in the sky, a ship among the clouds-- and suddenly everything changes.

I really love the idea of this book-- the premise is incredibly fresh and original, sort of in the vein of Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone series in that there's a real sense of the fantastical and sublime. The world beyond the clouds that Maria Dahvana Headley has imagined is full of wonder and beauty, and invites you to become immersed in it. The story is partly inspired by the Annals of Ulster, which are real life Irish records from centuries ago. I really enjoyed the fact that some of the fantasy elements were inspired by real things.

However, the actual writing and storyline left much to be desired. The prose itself is very sparse and lacking in a lot of description. I saw a comment by a reddit user who said that it felt like reading someone's dream written out, which I think describes Headley's prose perfectly. The writing was very disjointed and lacking in detail, and actually reminded me a bit of Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi-- there were some beautiful words but they weren't strung together with a lot of meaning or substance. We are constantly told about the beauty of the Magonia and its people but there were very little descriptions of how they actually looked like or how their society actually worked. Although Magonia has supposedly been around for centuries at minimum, its background and history is so hazy and underdeveloped that it doesn't quite feel real. I get the feeling the author didn't put much thought into these parts, and instead just kept trying to convince us that it's amazing without really showing us much evidence of it. The few glimpses we do get of Magonia are fantastic-- but it was really too little. In addition, there is some mention of the human world's "destruction" and "poison", and how it adversely affects Magonia, but it never gets truly explained. I suppose I can infer from the text that it refers to environmental destruction and pollution, but it just feels rather lazy of the author to not actually tell us in more detail. So much is left up to the reader to guess at; we are really working with less than the bare minimum.

I also felt like the few explanations we got for things would only be mentioned when they were absolutely necessary, almost put in as an afterthought so the author could move the story along-- like whenever the Magonian crew would need to do something and then Aza would briefly explain like "oh, the Magonians have this particular custom" which I assume she learned during her time on the ship, but she never mentions when she was actually talking to people and learning about these things. It was like the author told us that these things happened or these characters interacted, but we never actually saw the scenes, we only got told that they occurred afterwards. The book was also pretty short, in my opinion. The hardback I read was about as thick as an average book but the text was really spaced out with thick pages-- I really think the author could have fleshed out her story so much more.

I did like the main characters and their relationship. Aza has a very distinctive voice-- she's funny and irreverent, a far cry from the legions of cookie-cutter YA protagonists. Jason's intelligence and resources are far too unrealistic in my opinion, but I suppose the author had to find a way to make her plotline work. I really enjoyed his and Aza's friendship though, and it was really sweet how they grew up together and fell in love. I just really like the whole friends to lovers trope. I do think both he and Aza could have been developed further, along with just about everything else in this book. Still, I enjoyed it enough and am intrigued enough by the ideas in this book to read the sequel. ( )

Review originally posted at The Children's Book and Media Review

Aza Ray is drowning in air. She’s had a lung disease her whole life, and no one expects her to live very long. When she sees in a ship in the sky, her family thinks that it is another hallucination side effect to the many medications that she has to take, but Aza knows that it’s real because she can hear someone on the ship calling her name. Only her best friend, Jason, believes her, but before they can learn about what it is, Aza is taken from her regular world and put into another: Magonia. This is a world of trading ships above the clouds and here she can breathe. She also has incredible power if she discovers how to use it. But in this new world, she doesn’t know who to trust, and she realizes that she might have to go to war against her old home of Earth. Magonia has to choose her loyalty over the family she knows and the family she is just discovering.

Magonia is unlike any other book. For the first section of the book, it feels like another book about a dying girl, but then fantasy collides with the real world and takes the reader into a world that is unique. The author uses rich, poetic language that is likely to make the reader feel intense emotions about what Aza Ray is going through. Aza Ray and Jason are well-developed, but other characters are not as well described, and at times the new mythological world is confusing and strange. Parts of the story felt rushed and unclear, feeling like it could have used more time to develop some of the ideas. Because of its uniqueness, some readers will be put off, but others will love reading something that feels entirely new. ( )