Violet Wings by Victoria Hanley

Title: Violet Wings
Author: Victoria Hanley
Reading level: Young Adult
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: EgmontUSA (August 25, 2009)
Source: Library
Rating: 3 out of 5

My thoughts:
I love reading about fairies and the synopsis of Violet Wings sounded really good. Not to mention I love the cover too. But I have to say I was disappointed.

The main problem I have with Violet Wings starts right from the first chapter. When I think about fairies, I think magical. I visualize a world that is very different from the world we live in. It has to be non-mechanical to say the least. But the world in this book is far from that. All fairies are assigned a specific number of radia (magical units) and they are allowed to spend only a limited number in their lifetime. The place where these fairies and our girl, Zaria, lives is called Tirfeyne. Another problem is that Tirfeyne is made of huge buildings made of rubies and gems and diamonds. That itself had me loose interest.

Zaria is 14 year old fairy whose parents and brother go missing when she was is very young. A family friend is taking care of her. She wants to know what happened to them but there is no way of knowing. When she turns 14, she and her class are given their wands and their watches. The watches tell how much radia has been assigned to each fairy or genie. Zaria has one of the highest colors-violet.

After that its about her adventures as a fairy and her quest to find out what happened to her family. I had another problem with the book, it was too technical at times. There is a paragraph from the book ‘Genie Historian of Feyland’ at the start of every chapter which helps in understanding the rules of Feyland without disrupting the main story, which I think is a brilliant idea but sometimes it went over board.Take for e.g

Each color in a crystal watch contains ten degrees and represents more radia than the preceding color by a factor of ten.

That said, the story had a lot of potential, the writing was smooth flowing. Although I would not wholeheartedly recommend this book I would say it’s a descent read. And someone who does not have the same problems as I do with this book might even love it. Strictly for Young Adult lovers.