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bloodyrosemccoyAprilynne Pike’s Wings comes highly recommended by Stephenie Meyer, right on the cover and everything, but despite that it actually has a good premise.
Okay, the premise may not be able to save it, but by damn credit goes to her for trying.
Our hero, fifteen-year-old Laurel, is strange. Not in any personality sense (partly because, despite sprouting other things, Laurel never sprouts a personality), but in a behavioral sense. Laurel likes to expose her skin to outside air, rarely eats anything but salad, canned peaches, and soda, has never seen a doctor, and looks like a supermodel. Strange! Oh, and also she was left in a basket on her parents’ doorstep when she was a toddler, and she has just sprouted a giant winglike flower out of the middle of her back.
Despite Laurel’s supreme lack of interest in her own body (doesn’t care that she hasn’t started her period yet, or really wonder how she’s still alive on her anorexic diet), this last one sort of galvanizes her. She is no biology whiz, but she’s pretty sure this is not a normal part of puberty, so she goes to see her love interest, David, who is a biology whiz, and ask him if he has any ideas.
And it was then that I started to get prematurely excited.
I admit, I really liked this bit. David and Laurel (well, mostly David) investigate this phenomenon through some interesting do-it-yourself experiments, and it was fun to watch them logic it out. Granted, as the reader I was jumping up and down waving my hand in the air shouting “OOH I KNOW THIS ONE PICK ME,” but that is because I am one of those sorts of people who have already devoted serious thought to things like, to pick a purely random example, sentient humanoid plants.*
Guess what? Laurel is not human! She is a sentient humanoid plant!
It turns out she’s a faerie, which in this world is a kind of “highly evolved” (more on this later) plant. She’s got cell walls, photosynthesizes (which is why she hates being inside and refers to fluorescent lights as “dark”), supplements her photosynthesis with sugar (hence the drinking of SPRITE which would have been funnier if Pike hadn’t hung a lampshade on it later), bleeds sap, sprouts a flower once a year instead of ovulating, and of course doesn’t need to use shampoo to have FABULOUS hair.
So far, so good—I was actually rather enjoying myself. It was a solid premise, and I rather liked how Laurel handled it—she was distraught, but seemed to make rational decisions about figuring out what was going on. But there were a few problems even now … and then they started to pile up.
I say this book comes recommended by our old friend Stephenie Meyer, and you can see the Twilight influence here. In the same vein, the male love interest has much more personality than the protagonist herself, although not by much. At least, we know him enough to like him. We know that David is nice, that all the other girls want him but cannot have him, that he has great abs, that he likes beach bonfires, and that he is enough of a biology nerd that he has his own mini lab in his room—although that bit of characterization may also just be convenient to the plot, as it gives Laurel a safe place to study her newfound biological oddities.
That’s one of the few moments when Laurel really exhibits some initiative. It’s mostly up to David to study up on the seminal text, So You Think You’re A Human-Shaped Plant, and pass it on to her in short, easy words. But Laurel does invent one experiment of her own, to see how her lungs work with a plant’s respiratory cycle, and she gets credit for that even if the experiment was also a handy excuse to get them to lock their mouths together.
However, once again in the Twilight tradition, we can’t just have one love interest! We must have a triangle! Cue Tamani, our very own Puck, who I instantly disliked. He is Laurel’s link to the faerie world, and she knew him before he repeatedly wiped her memory so that she would think she was human (she’d apparently agreed to it before being left with her parents), which means he seems familiar and also devastatingly attractive to her. Since then he’s beenstalking her keeping her safe at a distance and falling in love with her, which is almost okay up to a scene toward the end where he tries to guilt her into a relationship because he’s put all this time and effort into it already.**
But his exposition is where it all fell apart. One tough part of fiction is figuring out how subtle your author is being. If your author is more subtle, the exposition can actually be less trustworthy, and for good reason: the character is speaking with all the biases, opinions, and preconceptions that come from their own lives, so it colors what they say. This kind of exposition is open to questioning by the reader and the characters. I suspect that Pike is not that kind of an author, and that she’s borrowingPuck Tamani to bring Laurel up to speed on The Way Things Definitely Are.***
Which is a problem for any actual biology nerd when we get to the thing about evolution, and questions began to arise:
-If faeries reproduce with pollen, blossoms, and seedlings—a rather cool idea, really—then why do they also have human-type primary and secondary sex organs? (There can be a good answer to this other than “They don’t.” I’ve seen it done. The question of whether it’s done here, though, is another one entirely.)
-Will the world ever see the day when spec fic writers don’t see evolution as an upward scale? Faeries are not “advanced” in their evolution. They are not “higher life-forms.” They are “complex.”
-Why do “highly evolved” life forms always look like “supermodels”? Why do they even have to look humanoid? (The second one has an answer: For The Story. A fair enough answer, but it still bugs me when authors make that assumption.)
-To pick up another shard of this smashed evolutionary theory, what is with the trolls? Trolls, we hear, are human-like creatures whose evolution inexplicably went bad or, well, something. The reasoning seems to be that some unfamiliar story version of the evolutionary process gave up on them and made them ugly, so really their best hope is to give up and wait for death’s sweet embrace. The fact that the trolls at this point seem fit enough to survive and pass on their genes does not, apparently make them an evolutionary success. I mean, they’re ugly.
If Pike is a subtle author, that las one may be a pass, as she exposes Tamani’s biases and explores his resulting fallacies in future books. If she is not, well then.
As to the other questions, well … they eclipsed the premise out for me more than any plot or character problems might have. The book was a fun read, and the idea of plant people still makes me very happy, but I am hoping someone comes along and does it better next time.
And no, I am not looking at the hastily-optioned movie. Sit back down, Miz Cyrus.
*Not to mention mushroom people. Not only do I have the plant-based Chong viss from my Doctors! universe; I also have, lying around from high school biology, a detailed workup of the possible anatomy of Toad from Super Mario.
**The part where he plant-jizzed all over her—no, really—NO, REALLY—didn’t help, either. Different cultures, different customs and all that, but DUDE WHAT THE HELL, MAN.
***Slacktivist’s in-depth dissection of Left Behind shows how entertaining this can be when the authors themselves are unreliable narrators. They think they’re writing unbiased, unsubtle narrative about the mighty Rayford Steele, Jet Pilot, doing his awesome thing, when Rayford’s actions clash so much with his inner monologue that he looks like a pompous buffoon.
Okay, the premise may not be able to save it, but by damn credit goes to her for trying.
Our hero, fifteen-year-old Laurel, is strange. Not in any personality sense (partly because, despite sprouting other things, Laurel never sprouts a personality), but in a behavioral sense. Laurel likes to expose her skin to outside air, rarely eats anything but salad, canned peaches, and soda, has never seen a doctor, and looks like a supermodel. Strange! Oh, and also she was left in a basket on her parents’ doorstep when she was a toddler, and she has just sprouted a giant winglike flower out of the middle of her back.
Despite Laurel’s supreme lack of interest in her own body (doesn’t care that she hasn’t started her period yet, or really wonder how she’s still alive on her anorexic diet), this last one sort of galvanizes her. She is no biology whiz, but she’s pretty sure this is not a normal part of puberty, so she goes to see her love interest, David, who is a biology whiz, and ask him if he has any ideas.
And it was then that I started to get prematurely excited.
I admit, I really liked this bit. David and Laurel (well, mostly David) investigate this phenomenon through some interesting do-it-yourself experiments, and it was fun to watch them logic it out. Granted, as the reader I was jumping up and down waving my hand in the air shouting “OOH I KNOW THIS ONE PICK ME,” but that is because I am one of those sorts of people who have already devoted serious thought to things like, to pick a purely random example, sentient humanoid plants.*
Guess what? Laurel is not human! She is a sentient humanoid plant!
It turns out she’s a faerie, which in this world is a kind of “highly evolved” (more on this later) plant. She’s got cell walls, photosynthesizes (which is why she hates being inside and refers to fluorescent lights as “dark”), supplements her photosynthesis with sugar (hence the drinking of SPRITE which would have been funnier if Pike hadn’t hung a lampshade on it later), bleeds sap, sprouts a flower once a year instead of ovulating, and of course doesn’t need to use shampoo to have FABULOUS hair.
So far, so good—I was actually rather enjoying myself. It was a solid premise, and I rather liked how Laurel handled it—she was distraught, but seemed to make rational decisions about figuring out what was going on. But there were a few problems even now … and then they started to pile up.
I say this book comes recommended by our old friend Stephenie Meyer, and you can see the Twilight influence here. In the same vein, the male love interest has much more personality than the protagonist herself, although not by much. At least, we know him enough to like him. We know that David is nice, that all the other girls want him but cannot have him, that he has great abs, that he likes beach bonfires, and that he is enough of a biology nerd that he has his own mini lab in his room—although that bit of characterization may also just be convenient to the plot, as it gives Laurel a safe place to study her newfound biological oddities.
That’s one of the few moments when Laurel really exhibits some initiative. It’s mostly up to David to study up on the seminal text, So You Think You’re A Human-Shaped Plant, and pass it on to her in short, easy words. But Laurel does invent one experiment of her own, to see how her lungs work with a plant’s respiratory cycle, and she gets credit for that even if the experiment was also a handy excuse to get them to lock their mouths together.
However, once again in the Twilight tradition, we can’t just have one love interest! We must have a triangle! Cue Tamani, our very own Puck, who I instantly disliked. He is Laurel’s link to the faerie world, and she knew him before he repeatedly wiped her memory so that she would think she was human (she’d apparently agreed to it before being left with her parents), which means he seems familiar and also devastatingly attractive to her. Since then he’s been
But his exposition is where it all fell apart. One tough part of fiction is figuring out how subtle your author is being. If your author is more subtle, the exposition can actually be less trustworthy, and for good reason: the character is speaking with all the biases, opinions, and preconceptions that come from their own lives, so it colors what they say. This kind of exposition is open to questioning by the reader and the characters. I suspect that Pike is not that kind of an author, and that she’s borrowing
Which is a problem for any actual biology nerd when we get to the thing about evolution, and questions began to arise:
-If faeries reproduce with pollen, blossoms, and seedlings—a rather cool idea, really—then why do they also have human-type primary and secondary sex organs? (There can be a good answer to this other than “They don’t.” I’ve seen it done. The question of whether it’s done here, though, is another one entirely.)
-Will the world ever see the day when spec fic writers don’t see evolution as an upward scale? Faeries are not “advanced” in their evolution. They are not “higher life-forms.” They are “complex.”
-Why do “highly evolved” life forms always look like “supermodels”? Why do they even have to look humanoid? (The second one has an answer: For The Story. A fair enough answer, but it still bugs me when authors make that assumption.)
-To pick up another shard of this smashed evolutionary theory, what is with the trolls? Trolls, we hear, are human-like creatures whose evolution inexplicably went bad or, well, something. The reasoning seems to be that some unfamiliar story version of the evolutionary process gave up on them and made them ugly, so really their best hope is to give up and wait for death’s sweet embrace. The fact that the trolls at this point seem fit enough to survive and pass on their genes does not, apparently make them an evolutionary success. I mean, they’re ugly.
If Pike is a subtle author, that las one may be a pass, as she exposes Tamani’s biases and explores his resulting fallacies in future books. If she is not, well then.
As to the other questions, well … they eclipsed the premise out for me more than any plot or character problems might have. The book was a fun read, and the idea of plant people still makes me very happy, but I am hoping someone comes along and does it better next time.
And no, I am not looking at the hastily-optioned movie. Sit back down, Miz Cyrus.
*Not to mention mushroom people. Not only do I have the plant-based Chong viss from my Doctors! universe; I also have, lying around from high school biology, a detailed workup of the possible anatomy of Toad from Super Mario.
**The part where he plant-jizzed all over her—no, really—NO, REALLY—didn’t help, either. Different cultures, different customs and all that, but DUDE WHAT THE HELL, MAN.
***Slacktivist’s in-depth dissection of Left Behind shows how entertaining this can be when the authors themselves are unreliable narrators. They think they’re writing unbiased, unsubtle narrative about the mighty Rayford Steele, Jet Pilot, doing his awesome thing, when Rayford’s actions clash so much with his inner monologue that he looks like a pompous buffoon.
