Here's the thing about this book: it's really really lovely and beautiful until the end. The end makes me very angry. So how the heck do you give a book a review when your feelings on it boil down to "I'd highly recommend it EXCEPT FOR THE END?" Read on, and let's find out.
This review is going to spoil most of the book because I find it very hard to talk about otherwise. There will be a spoiler space discussing what really cheesed me off as well.
So the humans of Balsinland and the pegasi of Rhiandomeer met and and became friends and allies eight hundred years ago or so. The humans needed a new home and this land was green and gorgeous, and the pegasi needed someone to help fend off all of the various creatures that eat pegasi that they aren't quite quipped to fend off alone. So they formed a long-lasting alliance and have attempted to form interspecies friendships ever since. Pegasi envy human strength and their hands (pegasi have some kind of weak partial hands on the ends of their wings, and while they do things like weaving and sculpting and papermaking, they do very thin-ish work), humans envy pegasi their flight and their beauty and grace. Various members of the royal families of both species are bound to each other on the human's 12th birthday in hopes of facilitating friendship, I think. This works to varying degrees, but hasn't been working well. For whatever reason humans have a horrible time figuring out pegasi language and pegasi have just as bad of a time in the other direction. The words tend to slip away from them. The body language between species is of course entirely different and hard to replicate, so everyone has to depend on the magician's guild of Speakers (or the pegasi shamans, though we don't see much of them for plot-related reasons) to attempt to translate for them. They actually seem to assume it's a terrible idea for the two species to communicate, apparently? ("You had ONE JOB" comes to mind when I read this...)
Imagine the surprise of everyone when the king's youngest child, Sylvi, and the pegasi's youngest son Ebon, are able to communicate easily and telepathically upon the occasion of their bonding. And thanks to Sylvi flubbing it up a bit and revealing she's heard Ebon's name before it was to be revealed to her, everyone knows about this. This royally pisses off the head magician Fthoom, who expresses his feelings Very Strongly about this to the king. The king, who's been the previous record holder in at least being able to somewhat communicate with his fellow king/bondmate, does not take this well at all and strips Fthoom of his title and forces him to go study in the library to see if he can find any examples of human/pegasi mental bonds.
Anyway...this story develops slowly, between explaining the history of the two nations and what they do and Sylvi and Ebon happily getting to know each other better than anyone ever has before (and even sneaking off to fly together, which is forbidden--I think it's something about humans being heavy and clumsy and thus aren't allowed to touch pegasi? Pegasi don't seem to have an issue with touching though). Eventually we go from the kids at 12/14 to Sylvi's sixteenth birthday, when Ebon successfully negotiates to get permission to let Sylvi visit the pegasi--something that's never happened before since (a) you'd have to fly there and (b) for whatever reason nobody can quite come up with, pegasi come to humans but not vice versa. Sylvi's even allowed to visit the sacred caves that show the pegasi history.
And honestly, it's all really lovely. The relationships between everyone are well done, not just Sylvi and Ebon. Both kings are genuinely good guys, their queens are genuinely lovely women (Sylvi's mom is actually a warrior, which is pretty sweet). We don't see that much of any of their siblings, but Ebon's sister Niahi stands out as being particularly delightful. And the baby pegasi... so cute!
Sylvi's visit to the pegasi is earth-shattering, though. Not only does she discover she can hear other pegasi besides Ebon there, she's able to view the history of their two nations in the caves and deduce--well, something the reader will probably have figured out long before they have it confirmed. At any rate, later into the book, we finally have it confirmed that there's a problem affecting both species in Balsinland, and Sylvi's the first to know it. So what's she going to do?
Well... that's where the book gets a bit off the rails, as Sylvi goes home and finds a hostile environment around her. She's become a whole new person with huge news to share, and is suddenly in an environment where the overall vibe is that she'd better keep her mouth shut or be super careful about what she says at all. That's bad enough (heck, she can't even get to tell her dad in private?!), but then the end...
Well. The end basically drops a damn anvil onto the entire book. Not only is it a cliffhanger that makes the reader start screaming for a sequel because it just can't end like this, it just SQUASHES everything that came before, horrendously painfully and even falsely in my opinion.* We're used to how fantasy novels have a problem and then the protagonists and their friends band together to figure out how to solve it. This book takes its slow sweet time in building--to be honest, probably a bit too much time. Not that I didn't enjoy the slow build of Sylvi and Ebon's friendship, but a bit more "one, two, skip a few" would probably have helped the book a bit, especially since essentially the time periods covered go from Sylvi at age 12 to Sylvi at 16. Also, we know Fthoom's the unsympathetic villain early on, but after his first major scene he's literally off camera for FOUR YEARS doing...what, exactly? By the time the book gets around to Fthoom finally dropping his anvil of mean on everyone, we're out of time and the book is over. Dear lord, I can kinda almost wish the book was a bit shorter so we didn't have to end on this shitty note if "too much word count for one book" was a publisher issue or something.
Even worse: there's probably never going to be a sequel. Why do I say this? Because after finishing this book and reeling in the WTF-ness, I went online looking for what the sequel was called, because this book came out in 2010 and there's got to be a sequel out by now--but nope! The author (apparently sequels aren't her strong suit in life?) had whopping writer's block and well...I don't think it sounds like it's ever gonna happen and the last update on this topic was in 2014. So...this is where the story ends, people. Don't hope there's gonna be more. (Which...maybe is for the best, since the author said that the second book would end on an even worse angering cliffhanger than this one.)
I don't want to rip on the author for this, really. Writer's block happens. Shit happens. It's not like she doesn't want to, but whatever in her brain isn't working on this topic any more. But at the same time...it's a very sad thing that writer's block happened so badly. I wish the writing gods would hit her with some inspiration on this one big time. COME ON, WRITING GODS.
So if not for the end of this book, I'd be giving it super high starring. The end, however, squashes you with unhappiness and anger. I kind of want to say "don't read it" because the end will make you miserable and I definitely can't say "wait until the rest of the books come out to read it." But before that, it was very, very good.
So here is my compromise: the book gets four stars. However, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you stop reading the book about page 320, right before Sylvi arrives home again. I don't know if you can pull it off or not to stop reading it, but for the sake of your anger levels, just stop there.
Spoiler space
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*I find it really, really, really hard to believe that the king, who's been nothing but kind and supportive to his daughter and pegasi, would just suddenly buy into Fthoom's obviously-made-up bullcrap about how Sylvi and Ebon's bond will destroy everything and they must be separated immediately and forever. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?!?!?!?! Seriously, that story was so full of bull (and obviously those two have been perfectly fine for the last four years) it makes no sense that suddenly everyone around Sylvi is buying into it, or why the king suddenly agrees to go along with it. I'm assuming "political reasons," but at the same time I am all, this is too damn much. I just don't think ...ARGH.
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