A review by liralen
Dirty Wings by Sarah McCarry
4.0
The word that comes to mind is saturated -- vibrant prose and complicated, messy characters. I loved [b:All Our Pretty Songs|16045120|All Our Pretty Songs (All Our Pretty Songs, #1)|Sarah McCarry|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1352781045s/16045120.jpg|19158383] (another word that comes to mind: greedy -- as in, I gobbled this up greedily), and this is the story of the mothers of the characters of that book...how they came to know each other and, in a sense, how they came to be.
Maia is an aspiring pianist, talented, driven, and isolated -- sometimes more pushed than driven. For all that she wants to succeed, and to give herself over to music, she hasn't found either herself or her place in music. Cass, meanwhile, lives on the streets; she is harder to define in part because she's not interested in being defined.
They wouldn't be an obvious match if this weren't YA fiction, but it works anyway. The journey they take is Maia's, mostly; she has more layers to shed and more to lose. But they both change, and make mistakes, and make defining choices. By the end of the book they're both different people, for better or for worse -- and there isn't a neat and tidy bow to tie everything up.
That's a very vague review, I know. I love the lushness of the writing and the knots of the characters. I complain about books becoming series when they'd work better as standalone stories, but this and All Our Pretty Songs do stand on their own, and...and I'm very much looking forward to the next book.
Maia is an aspiring pianist, talented, driven, and isolated -- sometimes more pushed than driven. For all that she wants to succeed, and to give herself over to music, she hasn't found either herself or her place in music. Cass, meanwhile, lives on the streets; she is harder to define in part because she's not interested in being defined.
They wouldn't be an obvious match if this weren't YA fiction, but it works anyway. The journey they take is Maia's, mostly; she has more layers to shed and more to lose. But they both change, and make mistakes, and make defining choices. By the end of the book they're both different people, for better or for worse -- and there isn't a neat and tidy bow to tie everything up.
That's a very vague review, I know. I love the lushness of the writing and the knots of the characters. I complain about books becoming series when they'd work better as standalone stories, but this and All Our Pretty Songs do stand on their own, and...and I'm very much looking forward to the next book.