I know this was released last week but that stupid thing called life took up too much of my time. So I am just going to post this and then you all can ooh and ahh and drool over its beauty!
I am obsessed with this cover! I think it is so beautiful. It bet it’s gonna look even better when it is printed!
There was a great article in the LA Times about the book along with an interview with Leigh Bardugo. You can read that right here.
Let me know what you think in the comments!
Magonia
by Maria Dahvana Headley
Rating: 4.5/5
What do you say about a book like Magonia? It is a beautiful, magical, and heart wrenching story. It took my breath away. (Okay that kind of seems like a weird thing to say when talking about a book with a character who can’t breathe.) It was one of the most creative stories I have read in a long time. It was completely its own. It did not follow your typical fantasy structure and it blended science fiction in to the story seamlessly. It pulled your heart strings back and forth and made you emotionally attached to the story from the very beginning. I think I started crying around page 70. And then just continuously throughout different parts of the book. I am not saying this is a sad book but a book that will transport you into another world. A world you can see, taste, smell, and touch without ever leaving your couch.
Aza Ray cannot breathe in this world. She has been sick her whole life, dying. The doctors do not know what is wrong with her and they can’t find any medicine that will help her. Five days before her sixteenth birthday she sees a ship in the sky floating among the clouds. Her parents think she is hallucinating, a side effect of the medication. The only person who believes her is Jason, her best friend. However, something happens and she ends up in another world, a world in the sky, Magonia. Aza realizes she can actually breathe in Magonia and that she holds great power. But as she adapts to her new life she learns that a war is coming and she must decide where her loyalties lie.
So this book seems weird. I mean I felt like it was weird when I first started reading it and learned what exactly Magonia is but as you continue to read it feels as if this world is your own world. One of the greatest parts of this book was the writing. Headley was able to capture my soul and my heart with her imaginative writing and incredible world building skills. She created a world like no other which is so hard to find these days. The amazing thing is that she took actual historical facts to create a world of her own. Her writing style was beautiful with a mix of magical descriptions to sassy, sarcastic conscious thoughts. She was able to write characters you could fall in love with and root for.
Aza Ray is an amazing character. The way she thinks and speaks is so refreshing. Her outlook on life is not the greatest since she is dying but she filters those thoughts into witty, sarcastic rants and crazy stream of consciousness thoughts that make you laugh out loud. Now I do admit I was kind of annoyed with her in the first 30 or 40 pages of the story. I felt like the novel was going to continue on this path of “feel sorry for me teenager” but then things changed and you almost become part of Aza Ray. Her relationship with her best friend, Jason, is cute and typical. But it is the moments after they are separated from each other that you understand how deep their connection goes and just how much they would do for each other.
And there is a small kind of love triangle. And you know I am a sucker for love triangles. But this is no Team Edward/Team Jacob melodrama. This is a connection between the earth and the sky. Between fate and love. Aza meets Dai in Magonia and they share a mutual power that connects them. It is two very different types of love so its hard to really say it’s a love triangle but more of a battle between wants and destiny.
This book completely captivated me. It is definitely one of the best book I have read all year. Can we talk about the cover for one second? I mean, look at it. It is so gorgeous and mesmerizing. Anyway, I highly recommend this book to everyone, there is no specific person that this book will speak to. I think everyone could read this book and enjoy it. I cannot wait for the sequel to see what happens to these characters that I grew to care so much about. After reading this I will never look at the sky again. I will constantly be looking for giant birds, cities, and blue people who sing beautiful songs. Always searching for a ship floating in the clouds.
Favorite Quotes
“I feel the entire inside of my body folding up, some kind of awful origami. I thought it would hurt, but the pain I’ve been feeling forever and ever is actually something that’s ceasing to matter to me, just like my bones no longer matter to me.”
“Life and death aren’t as different from each other as I thought they were. This isn’t like walking into a new country. This is walking into a new room in the same house. This is sharing a hallway and the same row of framed family pictures, but there’s a glass wall between.”
“I’m dark matter. The universe inside me is full of something, and science can’t even shine a light on it. I feel like I’m mostly made of mysteries.”
“If you look at the sky that way, it’s this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it.”
“You hold no horrors for me.”
“I can’t imagine a universe in which I try to unlove her.”
Between Pages 