{REVIEW} Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley

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MAGONIA
by Maria Dahvana Headley

Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy
Pub Date: April 28th 2015
Publisher: HarperCollins
Length: 309 pages
Spoilers: N/A
Goodreads ♦ Amazon($8.68)

 

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Aza Ray is drowning in thin air.

Since she was a baby, Aza has suffered from a mysterious lung disease that makes it ever harder for her to breathe, to speak—to live.

So when Aza catches a glimpse of a ship in the sky, her family chalks it up to a cruel side effect of her medication. But Aza doesn’t think this is a hallucination. She can hear someone on the ship calling her name.

Only her best friend, Jason, listens. Jason, who’s always been there. Jason, for whom she might have more-than-friendly feelings. But before Aza can consider that thrilling idea, something goes terribly wrong. Aza is lost to our world—and found, by another. Magonia.

Above the clouds, in a land of trading ships, Aza is not the weak and dying thing she was. In Magonia, she can breathe for the first time. Better, she has immense power—and as she navigates her new life, she discovers that war is coming. Magonia and Earth are on the cusp of a reckoning. And in Aza’s hands lies the fate of the whole of humanity—including the boy who loves her. Where do her loyalties lie?

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Wondrous Worlds
The world of Magonia is so fantastic! It’s unique, it’s intriguing. There are so many parts of it that are offered to the reader and yet… there’s one part that created a barrier between me and the world: the intangibility of it. Much of the world was explained in vague concepts. It’s like the author was going for ‘mysterious and alluring’ and landed somewhere in ‘confusing-ville’. Really disappointed with that because there was so much potential for the world.

Racing to Catch Up
This story took forever to get going. It wasn’t until 1/3 of the way through the book that it actually had a plot and I struggled getting to that point. It’s because of this initial slow pace, though, that the last 2/3 of the book felt like a scramble to catch up. Yet, even with the race to catch up, the scenes dragged. Thus, it felt like a constant back and forth between fast and sluggish.

So… the protagonist
The protagonist of the story, Aza Ray, is annoying as all get out. I understand she’s a teenager and she’s gonna have a horribly morbid outlook on life since she’s been dying her entire life, but still. She’s overly-brooding. She’s terribly naive. And she’s self-centered to boot. Frankly, I couldn’t stand reading from her point of view.

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