Breakaway Books

Authored by Samantha Mills; Published April 2024; Science Fiction/Fantasy

⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

The heart of the most powerful version of the story of The Wings Upon Her Back is the trauma that can be inflicted by a person seeking power, wrapped in the trappings of religion. Trauma inflicted on a person, inflicted on an entire society. In a different setting, with a more familiar culture or even more familiar political trappings, I’m not sure I would be able to read the novel with the amount of enjoyment that I did. But it felt alien enough that I was almost detached, feeling, if anything, sorrow for the victims of the tyranny.

At times, the characters felt almost robotic—perhaps purposely, considering how many of them had been surgically altered. The protagonist, Zenya, was abruptly thrown out of her job and her home, left for dead at the beginning of the novel. She roiled with conflicting emotions as she turned against the tyrannical system that betrayed her, but something about how she and the rebels with whom she was allied were portrayed just didn’t connect. Because of the construction of the novel, which skipped between Zenya’s training and the present, even as I came to empathize with her, I came to care less about the rebels. They were overshadowed by the depth of Zenya’s character. Zenya viewed the rebels with a type of contempt in the beginning, and that contempt was difficult for me to shake.

I’m torn about the world that Mills built–in some ways, I enjoyed it, particularly the creative ways that she crafted a society with a some version of access to their gods. The imagery was unique and evocative, and I couldn’t help but wonder how it would be portrayed on a screen. In other ways, I wanted more in terms of background. More about the different factions, more about the history. The larger plotline of the brewing civil war was slow to draw me in, and with just a little more intrigue, this could have been a real page-turner. 

The Wings Upon Her Back  is certainly a worthy read for those who considering the intersection of religion and power dynamics, who don’t want to be triggered by the tropes of our current political environment. Avoid it if you are sensitive to religious trauma, but dive in if you’re looking for a unique new world.