I wasn't sure I was going to bother reviewing the second and third book in this series. I just wasn't sure what I'd say. I liked the book? I hated the book? These books left me reeling, cringing, demoralised and strangely vitalised at the same time? How does one express that? In reading others' reviews, I sense I'm not the only person struggling to find the appropriate balance. I see a lot of middling reviews, indicative of a lot of emotionally confused readers. I can completely relate. That's where this book shoves its reader, right into the middle on 'how should I feel about that?' The problem is that while it's occasionally obvious, a lot of time it isn't. Not because the things that happen aren't horrid and denounce-able in the extreme, but because so many really, really bad things happen that some bad things just don't seem to rise to level of atrocity anymore (even though in isolation that would definitely be). It's rare for a book to transport a reader there. A major theme of this book (these books) is the abuse of the powerless by the powerful and it's amazing ability to remain socially invisible to otherwise good people. As an outsider it's hard to imagine how it's rationalised, but it is...everyday. Here, it's just made a little more obvious. We deal with a strict caste system, a violent patriarchy that allows women NO influence in their own lives, slavery, the marginalization of a native populace by a conquering people and the resulting institutionalised racism, economic entrapment, social stigmatisation, a dangerous and far reaching religious organisation, and a ruling class that can no longer understands their duty, blinded as they are by their perceived superiority. This leaves a lot of powerless people, many powerless on numerous fronts, and a myriad of ways for victims to be victimised...traumatised.In the middle of all this is Zarq, a young powerless woman who trips along and by dint of simply surviving the MANY horrors of her own life and being the right person in the right place at the right time manages to almost accidentally start a revolution. (Ah, the transformative power of even one person willing to sacrifice their all for the greater good!) And she does survive and witness horrors. Thus, the reader deals with them too. Beyond just the basic hardships of poverty and austerity (she spent 10 years in a remote convent as a child) there's kidnappings, rapes, battles, betrayal, attempted assassinations, loss and pitifully few moments of relief. It's all hard on the readers psyche. The book also treats sex as amazingly mutable. I actually really liked this about it, but we all know sex can tie people in knots faster that just about anything. We deal with consensual and non-consensual (a lot of the latter, though blessedly vague on details) sex of both the hetero- and homosexual (both M & F) variety (In fact, this is the clearest case of institutionalised rape I've ever seen in a book), incest, pedophilia, and even beastiality (though there's no interspecies penis/vagina contact). I can readily imagine a whole host of readers being put off by any one of those, let alone all of them in one text.So in the end I'm left wondering what I thought of Shadowed by Wings. I certainly didn't enjoy reading it, but having finished it, I'm really glad to have read it. I recommend others do the same.
Strangely, I was getting nostalgic for those days when, in Korea, I rarely got my hands on the books in a series in order. Maybe I missed the frantic mental coloring-in one has to do when faced with gaps in characters' pasts. Reading things chronologically is so, y'know, passé.Anyway, I picked up this second book because I'd vaguely heard of the series, and the first few pages that I flipped through had the protagonist being whipped. I can appreciate an author who doesn't spare the rod when it comes to her characters.Cross might take this to extremes. Zarq is training to be a Dragonmaster despite being a woman; this involves trying to arouse a dragon with your body while he tries to kill you, so that he's in the proper state to go breed with a female. Um. Yeah. There's also drug addiction, (more explicit) bestiality, rape, serious psychological slavery... And these aren't treated as horrors. They're bad things, but they're events that apparently are supposed to just be dealt with, moving on to the next crazy violent disturbing occurrence.Meanwhile, for some semblance of an overarching plot, Zarq is being haunted by the spirit of her mother, who wants her to find her half-sister -- whom she's sure is dead.No, I didn't find this sufficient recompense either.Kind of weirdly fascinating, as in, Did the author really write that? Ugh!, and not terribly written if you just look at the use of the English language, but I'd avoid it. I'm certainly not going to hunt down the other books in this series.
Do You like book Shadowed By Wings (2007)?
I picked this book up somewhere at a discount but still think that I spent way too much on it. It isn't badly written just bad writing. The storyline apparently picks up (this is book 2) as our female character is entered as a sort of dragonmaster apprentice in a kingdom where women aren't even second class.The back cover sounded good. Actually it sounded really good. So much for truth in advertising. We had our heroine being whipped, tortured, raped by a dragon, starved, forced into manual labor, threatened with all sorts of punishments, and haunted by a ghost. She was then forced to slave for a dragon and act as a whore for it (and she enjoyed that?!?), all the while supposedly working towards controlling the beasts. Not a story I will ever reread, nor do I recommend it for anything but lining the bottom of a birdcage.****Someone told me I was mistaken about the story.I wasn't but now I want to add that the writing was repetitive and sloppy: the author used the same phrasing over and over to describe similiar actions.
—Doris
