The Girl with Borrowed Wings by Rinsai Rossetti

I don't usually read YA fiction though I know there's a trend right now for adults to gobble it up, especially if books are part of a trilogy, and I don't quite understand this phenomenon, especially the trilogy part. (Except, of course, trilogies make more money for publishers.)  However, I did read The Book Thief last year (long after the brouhaha about it was over and when I could borrow it from the library without being placed on a hold list of a few hundred patrons) and couldn't believe The Book Thief was designated YA.  (FYI: It wasn't categorized as YA in the country of its original publication, Australia.)  Anyway, I just finished reading The Girl with Borrowed Wings by Rinsai Rossetti which was published by Dial Books, an imprint of Penguin, and the designation of YA is very appropriate-- so much so that I almost stopped reading several times for a few reasons.

But before I go into those reasons, I want to say that while I was reading The Girl with Borrowed Wings I imagined myself at twelve years old reading this, and I would have loved it.  Why? I would have loved the fantasy, the different worlds, and the flying.   Reading this as someone who is far older than twelve, well, it's different.

One difficulty I had is one I have with many novels told in first person.  I find it hard to believe that narrators think lyrically, especially young narrators though I'm not sure how old the narrator is when she's telling her story.  Nonetheless.  Even if the narrator is now fifty and telling her childhood story, it's hard to believe she's thinking so lyrically.  But as I said, this is a problem I have with many first person narrators.

Another difficulty I had was with freedom.  Oh, don't get me wrong.  I love freedom, and books written by Americans are almost always a story about gaining freedom.  But Rossetti uses freedom so blatantly-- there was no subtlety at all.  Again, thinking as a twelve year old this wouldn't have mattered because I was yearning for freedom myself at that age.

And the last major difficulty I had was with the last forty pages or so.  It was as if someone told the author, "Your main character needs to change in order for it to be a story, and she's got to change drastically, and there's got to be a satisfying resolution to the story."  Unfortunately, the writing lesson about character development that has been taught in English classes or literature classes or in writing workshops or in a zillion places in cyberspace or wherever needs to be tossed out the window.  If you want a good reason to do so, study the last 37 pages of The Girl with Borrowed Wings-- after reading the entire novel, of course.  But again, this wouldn't have bothered me if I were twelve, for I wouldn't have noticed this remarkable gain in speed in the story telling, this remarkable change in narrator Frenenqer Paje. Instead, I would have thought, "Wow, anything's possible."  Now, I just think that the author either got tired of writing or her editor commanded this spectacular and speedy change because the editor didn't want to risk Goodreads reviews that criticized the book because the protagonist didn't change in an obvious way.