Well, well, well…

So, Magonia is one of those books that I.. I honestly don’t know how to rate. Because.. why. Why waste that potential. Magonia has a promising cover, a promising summary, a promising beginning and characters that I liked in the beginning, but then it just.. hit a dead-end. The story spiraled out of control, and.. it lost me. The level of weirdness is HIGH. It went from slowly building up to something I would’ve liked to.. I don’t know. I really don’t know what half of this book really was .
Which is such a shame. The writing (in the beginning, anyway) was awesome. I really really liked it, and I found so many quotable paragraphs and stuff like this…

If you look at the sky that way, it’s this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it.

…. that I simply adored. I mean, look at that. How can a book with that paragraph go wrong?

The answer: Confuse your reader.
Confuse your reader how, you may ask?

Answer: Introduce bird people.
Giant bird people.
Giant blue bird people.
On a ship.
In the sky.
Flying toward.. I really don’t know.

Yes, as you can imagine, that was an UNPLEASANT surprise, considering that the book started out normally, and that I loved the MC, Aza’s, personality and character.
But, that’s not the worst of it. Aza loses her personality, or changes her personality, or something . The Aza in the beginning completely changed after the big reveal, and her character felt so vastly different from what we started with. In the beginning, Aza was sassy, sarcastic, funny. I don’t know what happened, but she changed. And that kinda ruined the story for me.
Then we have world-building. Eh, I admit, I really would’ve liked more details about the world. I mean, a ship? In the sky? Sailing on clouds? Come on, give me some descriptions. Some. Any. Any more than what we got, because I really could’ve used more world-building.
But one thing I got to applaud the author on is the clever mythology . It was unheard of, and completely new. What I found really cool is the fact that it wasn’t all the author’s imagination, that it actually was thought of in history. That said, this was perhaps the reason why I felt the world-building was lacking: the fact that the world was unheard of and that it really needs to be presented in a clearer light for the reader to fully grasp the concepts of the setting and surroundings.
Overall, I really enjoyed the book, but something about it was a bit off. It was definitely unique, maybe a bit too unique, but I liked it all the same. Recommended.