| $@%&! level: Medium-Low “Bedroom” level: None Violence level: None (but I expect there will be plenty in the sequel) Back Cover: “Princess Sylviianel has always known that on her twelfth birthday she too would be bound to her own pegasus. All members of the royal family have been thus bound since the Alliance was made almost a thousand years ago: the binding system was created to strengthen the Alliance, because humans and pegasi can only communicate formally, through specially trained Speaker magicians. Sylvi is accustomed to seeing pegasi every day at the palace, but she still finds the idea of her binding very daunting. The official phrase is that your pegasus is your “Excellent Friend.” But how can you be friends with someone you can't talk to? But everything is different for Sylvi and Ebon from the moment they meet at her binding—when they discover they can talk to each other. They form so close a bond that it becomes a threat to the status quo—and possibly to the future safety of their two nations. For some of the magicians believe there is a reason humans and pegasi should not fully understand each other....” |
So why do I like it? Well, there's the aforementioned stubbornness of Sylvi and Ebon to start out with. I do like characters who think about and question what they've been taught. I suspect Sylvi is almost as much pegasus as she is human, although I don't know why that is. But she's obviously got the makings of a pegasus shaman, even if she is the wrong shape. And I actually enjoyed the slow build up, with the revelation of history and the intimations of political intrigue. By the end, it's awfully hard to tell who's lying, although it's easy to tell who you want to be lying. Trying to figure out why they're lying though, and about what exactly, that could be more tricky.
And the thing I enjoy most about it is how you get the views of both species about the other. I love that humans envy pegasus wings, and pegasi envy human hands and wrists. The pegasi here do actually have hands, sort of, and I think that's a cool innovation that makes them even more interesting to read. But they're weak hands, in spite of their nimbleness, so they long for hands as strong and flexible as humans, just as humans long to be able to fly. I like how unexpected that is, that each side thinks the other one is more blessed, and because they can't communicate properly, they tend to misconstrue even each other's body language. I'm a bit surprised there wasn't even more trouble over that.
So, yes, I suspect this book will be exceptionally good—once it has a sequel.