Review: Beautiful, enthralling, and made me cry at one point
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 14, 2013
Star Rating? 4 from the beginning to about the last quarter. That last quarter is 5 stars. But 4 overall. I cried at the end of this book.This book started off so well - it immediately gripped my attention and the initial dream sequence was amazingly written, conveying all those ethereal qualities of dreams that MAKE it a dream. It played like a movie in my head: white feathers falling, a golden feather, soft landing, that muted sound you have in dreamlike state, etc.I found the description of the plot summary to be a little misleading; she never told a soul? She had no idea that she was missing her memory! How could she? She was such a little girl! As I was reading and gathering the information in the story, I kept circling back to this. Is there some huge trauma involved to cause amnesia? PATIENCE. Patience is necessary; it all unfolds beautifully.The poems/songs that help relay the story are beautiful and haunting as are the flashback sequences. Ms. Michaels builds this incredible world of society within our own that we are oblivious to. As we all know, history can be told through tales, and that is what keeps this world rich: the various origin tales relaying the history of the Society of Feathers. The stories/songs relayed by Falcon, Diana, Iris's mother are really beautiful and probably heavily prophetic.Iris, aka Izzy, is named after a character in a story of her people. The correlation between that story as well as "The Sparrow and the Fairy Wren" and Iris's life makes you bite your lip in anticipation of what must come.I am deliberately being vague; you have to read this to understand the characters and how everything unfurls. I will say that I was keeping notes of the different kinds of birds and what I know about them or not and what to google as personalities and the types of birds go hand in hand. As Iris regains her memory and...BECOMES, I liked her more and more. She was a little flat to begin with, but seeing as how she was missing her memories it is to be expected. I cried near the end. You'll see why.I cannot WAIT for October 2013 when Eyrie, book 2 comes out. I want to follow along this story, I want to see Iris & Falcon's relationship develop. The action was just picking up at the end of this novel after we got a solid foothold in the world the author has built, a solid glimpse of who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and now the mystery of what is to come.