I began enjoying this story although the premise is a bit lacking in credibility - a lush tropical island off the coast of a desert mainland, the one populated by Sylphs (fairies, basically, but with feathered wings) and the other by savage humans, and never once have the humans come to the island until this single time when a handful of them arrive seemingly for the sole purpose of kidnapping Ravenna, the one special snowflake on the whole island?
Here's where Ravenna, supposedly a smart scholar, comes off as being stupid, because she could easily have stayed out of their way, or better yet, snuck back to her own people to warn them of this threat, but she does neither. Instead, she romps right into the middle of the camp when she thinks the humans are sleeping, sneaking around to spy on their stuff and is of course captured, whereupon the men simply haul up stakes and leave! It was like they were just waiting for her to arrive.
Naturally Ravenna is a myth come to life and fascinates everyone on the mainland, very nearly all of whom are consistently mean, brutal, and cruel, yet not a single one of these people thinks about going back to the island to see if there are more like her despite her being almost priceless. It made zero sense. It made no sense that no human had ever been to the island before - not in living memory anyway.
We're told Ravenna, as a Sylph, is a different species to humans, and the polar opposite, yet later we meet someone who is supposed to be a half-breed. How is this possible? The definition of a species is a group of living things which can breed within the group but not outside it. If she can breed with humans, she's human, or humans are Sylphs, one or the other. The thing about Ravenna though, as she's described, is that she is fully human. Apart from her wings, she's exactly like a human. She has breasts - and so is a mammal. She thinks like a human, acts like one, and she looks just like one - again, apart from the wings. There's nothing about her that seems alien or different, or otherworldly. That's a serious writing problem.
The wings are problematical too, and not just because they're stuck on - coming out of the middle of her back like an afterthought rather than a real appendage. I've discussed how little sense this makes in other reviews. Wings are limbs and so Ravenna is not a quadruped, but a hexapod (technically a sexaped if we're going to be linguistically correct, but hexapod wins for obvious reasons!) and there's nowhere back there for her wings to really attach!
But let's let that slide. The real problem with her wings is their variable size. We're told that Ravenna is different because she has undersized wings - too small and weak for her to fly with, yet later in the story we read, when she's riding a horse: "Her wings lay behind her on the horse's rump, both to keep them out of the way of the pounding hooves..." - if they're small and short, why would the hooves be a problem? This question is posed by the author herself indirectly when later we read, "Ravenna relaxed her wings and sat on the small stool." Now if she can relax and sit on a small stool without worrying about the wings trailing on the floor, then why were they a problem sitting on the horse? Was the horse shorter than a small stool?! Again it made no sense.
It makes less sense when Ravenna is trained as a gladiator, and she alternately sees her wings as a powerful fighting tool and a grave weakness. They can't be both. If the wings are strong enough to beat and knock someone over, then why can't she fly? Again the rules for her wings change - not just in how big they are, but in how strong they are. I continually got the impression that the author hadn't really thought this whole disabled Sylph' thing through, and the consequence of this was that the utility of the wings changed according to circumstance and that resulted in my repeatedly being kicked out of suspension of disbelief.
The book description, which admittedly the author has no control over unless they self-publish, has this: "Until, that is, Ravenna makes a single mistake. She falls." I don't know what that means. Maybe it comes later in the story than I could stand to read, but it makes little sense even in the blurb.
I didn't finish this because I became so disappointed in it: in the writing and the plot, and in Ravenna's complete lack of any sort of rebellious streak or even a spine to attach her wings to! The story sounded like it might be great; the execution of it not so much, and I began losing all interest in it when I reached the long, tedious, drawn-out portion that began right after she was kidnapped. There was far too long with far too little happening and it bored me to tears, especially since I'd already begun to lose interest in Ravenna as an engaging and strong female character. I can't commend this.
