The long awaited book sixteen in this series. Will it be good? Spoilers ahead.
After fleeing Jade Mountain with his sister Sora, Umber and her end up stranded on a mysterious group of islands south of Pyrrhia. There, he learns about the different dragons that live there, including the WildWings (basically hybrids of all kinds) and SharpWings (sapient dragon robots). He also befriends a prince named Mulberry. Umber soon learns the truth about the islands: These were meant to keep prisoners in and escaping is impossible for everyone except Mulberry. Umber and his new friends now must work together to learn about the past and hopefully find a way to escape the prison island in the present.
I honestly wasn’t wow-ed by this book at all. I do think that Wings of Fire has been declining in quality a bit in recent years, and this book didn’t do anything to prove me wrong.
First of all, I really wasn’t that invested in this new setting and most of the new characters (except Platypus, who was decent). Umber himself was also a very bland protagonist, at least by Tui standards. Most of her protagonist have clear flaws and quirks, and by comparison Umber just felt a bit generic and less defined than previous Wings of Fire protagonists. I also wish that Sora’s arc got more focus. You’d think that, with the major role she played in book one of arc two, that she’d get a solid amount of page-time in this book, but honestly she felt much more like a minor character here.
I also didn’t like how the locations here just didn’t feel as well-described as in previous Wings of Fire books. I kind of had a hard time envisioning the environments and especially the large buildings and the rooms based on Tui’s descriptions. So I wish these were clearer.
The plot also didn’t have me hooked exactly. It’s mainly just “character ends up imprisoned. Character has to find out a way to be not imprisoned anymore”. Which can be fine, when executed properly. But here, I was honestly pretty bored by most of the goings-ons a lot of the time. Since I didn’t particularly care for Umber or all these new characters, I also felt very little attachment to their plight and them needing to get out. If Sutherland had managed to hook me on the world-building of his island and these new characters, that probably wouldn’t have been the case.
I also just gotta bring up again that Sutherland can’t write romance for the life of her. Instead of there being a genuine connection between Mulberry and Umber that builds overtime, they pretty much hit it off from the start and most of Umber’s inner monologue when he’s around Mulberry is just about how much he likes him and how much he thinks that Mulberry is perfect. So we don’t just get the old “love at first sight”-trope (lame), but also that obonoxious constantly pining inner monologue from Umber. Really annoying. I do like that we get more LGBT+ representation in these books, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for it, but if it’s gonna be written this poorly I rather wouldn’t have any romance in these books at all, straight or queer.
So yeah, not a book that exactly grabbed me or anything. I wouldn’t call it outright bad per se (I’ve read much worse), but goodness, I wish it was better for sure. I hope book seventeen will do more to hook me with its new story and characters, because this book utterly failed in that regard.
Rating: 3/5
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