ISBN: 9781948463553
Somewhere between YA and full paranormal romance House of Beating Wings by Olivia Wildstein begins with Fallon, a half-fae young woman living in a world where everyone has strict expectations of her, but they mostly–infuriatingly–just expect her to “Be good and not cause trouble”. Everyone, it seems, knows secrets about her. All Fallon wants from life is some kind of shift toward justice, a world where the oppression of the fae ruling class doesn’t exist, where she’s free to be more than a bar maid, and where she has a real chance at her crush, Prince Dante.
At the beginning of this lush, beautifully woven tale Fallon is…idealistic and frustratingly naïve. She feels smothered by everyone’s expectations of her, and by the social structures that she lives in. She has idealistic views of the people around her, which are shattered when her first romantic experiences with Dante. So she acts out, chasing down a quest given to her by a seer who claims she will have the throne. That’s what she wants, after all, to have Dante and to have the power to make the world a better place.
However, as any reader can guess, if not from past reading, then from the lackluster way Dante treats her, he, and everyone else in her life, have these secrets for a reason, a reason that Fallon blows up by not “being a good girl”. The oppressive feel of the narrative is genius. Fallon is aware of her feelings, and of the unfairness of her society, and her own inability to continue participating in it. But then, like a teen, she jumps into changing the world with very skewed versions of the effort and effects her actions will have.
Other reviews tell me readers can find this annoying, but I found it a subtle, clever building up to a unique coming of age story in the romantasy field. The genre is filled with tales of dark, fierce men rescuing and loving innocent, over looked and sometimes abused women. This book twists that trope, giving readers a heroine who is so well loved and protected that she is oppressed into a net of control by her family that she can’t help but try to break free of. Likewise, we see the dark, handsome, powerful prince, who doesn’t rescue the heroine, but rather seeks to maintain the status quo. I particularly enjoyed that Fallon and Dante’s romantic interlude was awkward and unsatisfactory and just all together wrong, rather than being this magical thing that changes the world it spurs Fallon into finally striking out and building her own life. In my delvings into popular romantasy I find that to be a rare thing.
Besides beautiful prose and a subtly of world building that I admire, House of Beating Wings is the start of an enjoyable series that I devoured. Familiar, but also refreshingly different with its elements (and more healthy in its depictions of romance) I highly recommend it to romantasy and PNR readers.