Author: Rebecca Merry Murdoch (no website found)
Publisher: Bark and Howl Press Ltd
Rating: WARTY!
Illustrations by Kalen Chock.
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
I almost selected this from Net Galley, but I changed my mind thinking I wouldn't like it; then I read something else by this author and I really liked that, so I went back and picked this one. I wasn't impressed with it, which surprised me because I really liked the other thing I read: Wild cats Volume One. I lost interest in this one about a third the way in and skimmed the rest just to see if it turned around. It didn't.
Of course, this isn't aimed at me - it's aimed at middle-grade (at least as judged by the writing level), and maybe they will like it, but I have to warn you if you're a parent or guardian, that the story is seriously brutal and gory in places with prolonged pages of bullying. This didn't appeal to me, although the story was one of rebellion by the subjugated against the evil overlords, so there was a kind of justification for it.
The story is about a race of people (who, from the sparse illustrations are evidently humanoid despite their traits, who live in the valleys, overseen by the urvogel people - a race of humanoid flying creatures - kinda like angels, I guess. One of the lowland women mated with one of the urvogels and the offspring was Rocco - an angel with blue wings, who comes in as an outsider and wins the affections of the urvogel youth, who then rebel with him.
This business of interspecies mating made no sense to me, but this is fantasy, so I didn't have any real argument with that. What bothered me more is that the urvogel guy, Rocco's father, must have known, as indeed did his mother, what a horrible life Rocco would have as a "half-breed", yet they still spawned him. This struck me as irresponsible in the context of the story because it put both his and his mother's life at risk. It's not discussed in the portion I paid close attention to, and it's not likely to be at this point, either, due to certain events which would be too big of a spoiler to reveal.
The worst thing of all for me though, was the exclusion of females - and this in a novel by a female author! The main character (and hero) Rocco, is male, and this story is very much aimed at a male audience. There are female characters in it, and the "bad guy" is female, but there really is only one token girl (again, I skimmed a lot of this so I may have missed something) who plays any sort of significant rôle in the story) other than the aforementioned bad guy).
I know this is (evidently) aimed at young males, but even so there's a real need for serious female representation. The author says, in the acknowledgements, that she spent four years on this novel, and I find it unacceptable that this isn't written better and doesn't have more female representation. I don't care if it is aimed at young boys. That's still no excuse for excluding half the population from any kind of reasonable representation. The glass ceiling doesn't just exist in industry, it exists from birth and it needs to be smashed as early as possibly. That's the main reason why I'm rating this negatively.
