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Book Reviewed by:A loyal warrior in a crisis of faith must fight to regain her place and begin her life again while questioning the events of her past. This gripping science-fantasy novel from a Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus Award-winning debut author is a complex, action-packed exploration of the costs of zealous faith, ceaseless conflicts, and unquestioning obedience.
Zenya was a teenager when she ran away from home to join the mechanically-modified warrior sect. She was determined to earn mechanized wings and protect the people and city she loved. Under the strict tutelage of a mercurial, charismatic leader, Zenya became Winged Zemolai.
But after twenty-six years of service, Zemolai is disillusioned with her role as an enforcer in an increasingly fascist state. After one tragic act of mercy, she is cast out and loses everything she worked for. As Zemolai fights for her life, she begins to understand the true nature of her sect, her leader, and the gods themselves.
This extraordinary book examines the faith of one woman at two different turning points in her life. The child Zenya renounces familiarity and family to answer the call of a god she believes in with every fiber of her being, only to learn that there is still more she must give up to prove herself. The jaded, broken warrior Zemolai, cast off after one misguided act of mercy, is faced with a reckoning that threatens to shatter her once rock-solid faith entirely. What Mills does so expertly is elicit the same level of empathy from the reader for a woman at two wildly different life stages. In alternating chapters, we watch both journeys: the child learning that her fantasies of heroism are not everything she dreamed and the woman coming to terms with those dreams finally and forever breaking up around her in the face of a darker but necessary truth. The reader pines for Zenya to allow room for doubt into a worldview rapidly spiraling into zealotry and for wounded Zemolai to allow herself to grieve for the faith she is losing...continued
Full Review
(883 words)
(Reviewed by Sara Fiore).
The heart of the story in The Wings Upon Her Back lies in Zenya's hard-fought battle with her faith. Indoctrinated into the service of the mecha god in her youth, she has only ever known faith without question. The deconstruction of that faith and the rebuilding of her identity as a freethinking woman with agency isn't entirely assured by the book's end, but she has taken her first steps toward a worldview based on her own choices and ideas.
Part of what makes Zenya's deconstruction so difficult is her firm belief that anything, be it thought or written word, that even suggests a lack of faith in the mecha god is heresy and therefore dooms her to be cast away from the light of her deity. Deconstructing, or taking apart and examining...
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