#BookReview of Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley

Reviewed By: Rachael

Publisher: HarperCollins

Recommended Age: Young Adult

Genre: Fantasy, Romance

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About the Book: #1 New York Times bestseller Maria Dahvana Headley’s soaring sky fantasy Magonia is now in paperback!

Since she was a baby, Aza Ray Boyle has suffered from a mysterious lung disease that makes it ever harder for her to breathe, to speak—to live. So when Aza catches a glimpse of a ship in the sky, her family chalks it up to a cruel side effect of her medication. But Aza doesn’t think this is a hallucination. She can hear someone on the ship calling her name.

Only her best friend, Jason, listens. Jason, who’s always been there. Jason, for whom she might have more-than-friendly feelings. But before Aza can consider that thrilling idea, something goes terribly wrong. Aza is lost to our world—and found by another. Magonia.

Above the clouds, in a land of trading ships, Aza is not the weak and dying thing she was. In Magonia, she can breathe for the first time. Better, she has immense power—but as she navigates her new life, she discovers that war between Magonia and Earth is coming. In Aza’s hands lies the fate of the whole of humanity—including the boy who loves her. Where do her loyalties lie?






About the Author: Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling author of, most recently, THE MERE WIFE (out July 17, 2018 from MCD/FSG). Upcoming in 2019 is a new translation of BEOWULF, also from FSG. As well, she is the author of the young adult skyship novels MAGONIA and AERIE from HarperCollins, the dark fantasy/alt-history novel QUEEN OF KINGS, the internationally bestselling memoir THE YEAR OF YES, and THE END OF THE SENTENCE, a novella co-written with Kat Howard, from Subterranean. With Neil Gaiman, she is the New York Times-bestselling co-editor of the monster anthology UNNATURAL CREATURES, benefitting 826DC. 

Her Nebula,Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy award-nominated short fiction has appeared on Tor.com, and in The Toast, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Apex, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Subterranean Online, Glitter & Mayhem and Jurassic London's The Lowest Heaven and The Book of the Dead, Uncanny, Shimmer, and more. It's anthologized in Best American Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as the 2013 and 2014 editions of Rich Horton's The Year's Best Fantasy & Science Fiction, & Paula Guran's 2013 The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, in The Year's Best Weird Volume 1, ed. Laird Barron, and in Wastelands, Vol 2, among others. She's also a playwright and essayist. 

She grew up in rural Idaho on a sled-dog ranch, spent part of her 20's as a pirate negotiator and ship marketer in the maritime industry, and now lives in Brooklyn in an apartment shared with a seven-foot-long stuffed crocodile.

Do I Recommend this book? Ehh...

Notes and Opinions: Okay, to start off, whoever thought it was a good idea to compare this to The Fault in Our Stars must not have read the book.  Because that is one of the worst comparisons I've ever seen.  I mean even Stardust is a stretch.  This is more like a combo of spirit animal meets the body snatchers. So this one so didn't do it for me.  The story itself was like amazing!  But the way it was written really made me want to just throw it away.  (have I ever said that before? the horror)  But it was really annoying.  The first 90 or so pages is all about Aza's illness that is a mystery to everyone.  And she is so well down on herself.  Sad Sad Sad, then all of a sudden you get some great humor around chapter 8 or 9.  This book was very weird from the writing style to things like the following. There is this bird that is in her lung and then it can come out and in and it doesn't hurt. This is after she is ripped out of her earthly body and taken to the air ships that float around in the sky and we can't see them because they are hidden in the clouds by these giant whale things. Ya that was a little far fetched in our world today.  Then toss in a city (ENTIRE CITY!!!) just sitting up there in the clouds and well they kinda lost me completely.  So in the end this one I didnt like the writing style at all and the world was a little to far fetched.  If the world of us humans would have been set in like pre internet time etc.  It would have made more sense that we didnt know that this excited.  Other than that the story line I really liked.  I think it just needed polished a little bit more. 
 

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Posted in: 2 Stars, HarperCollins, Review, Young Adult