Cover 5

A Flight of Broken Wings

2018 • 318 pages

Ratings1

Average rating4

15

I got my copy from the author for free, in exchange for an honest review.
On that front, I have to add one more thing I feel is important to mention. The big retailers of ebook were having some issue with me, as I am living in Hungary. Many seem to think my address is fake, etc. When I told the author, she got back to me in a matter of hours and sent the file without having to deal with websites moaning at me. I thank her for it and I really appreciate her help.

So about the book. In a country that is the fantasy version of India, one of the big issues is the regular attacks perpetrated by winged creatures called the Aeriels. Our main character is part of the police force protecting humans from them and solving crimes.
One day they get news about the Aeriels planning on stealing some plans of new, more effective weapons and Ruban, our protagonist, has to team up with a pampered foreign royal, Ashwin, to get to the bottom of it and avoid imminent catastrophe.

Urban fantasy with mystery is always a good pairing in my book, then again, I am a huge Dresden Files fan, so I was pretty much trained like Pavlov's dog to automatically get interested. Another thing I love is creatures. Something is fascinating about humans having to deal with creatures not human, but not quite animal either.
In this case the winged ones are actually far more advanced than humans, stronger, faster, with powers far above what a normal person can do. In that sense, this reminded me of Attack on Titan (albeit much, much less gory and terrifying); there is some sort of an outside power and people have forgotten a lot about their origins, because of our much shorter lifespans.
It's just so striking, imagining these people with giant wings showing up to rain hell on you and you don't even understand why, because hey, these Aeriels were alive before your great grandparents and you are only a tiny speck in their lives.

Ruban isn't a happy person. He is gloomy and grumpy and hates the fact people are interested in him because he does his job well. He is not trying to get attention or glory, he just wants to kick ass and protect the people. I can respect that.
As an opposite, we have Ashwin. Dude is hilarious, manipulative, he loves it when he is the centre of attention. He does what he does and makes himself look like an innocent little cinnamon bun in the process. Their opposite personalities really elevate this story. I always enjoy that kind of dynamic.

One thing kept me from getting into this even faster; there are many characters in such a short-ish book. I'm really bad with remembering names, so sometimes I felt like I couldn't remember who was the TV crew assistant person and who was some random person at a hotel.
If you are a bit smarter than I am, you probably won't have any issues on that front. :D
There were some minor continuity issues with the timeline, but I doubt anyone else noticed that.

All in all, I do recommend it.

July 8, 2021Report this review