Wing Jones (You Were Made to Fly)

This review includes spoilers of WING JONES.

Initially, I was looking at this book and wondering what it was about. The blurb intrigued me, as I think it has with many people, due to mention of Wing's grandmothers, one being from Ghana, the other from China. Just reading that alone sets the curiosity of What sort of girl will Wing be with those sort of backgrounds? What kind of household does she live in? As a person who loved and lost her grandma at age 11, I picked it up and wanted to know Wing's relationship with them, immediately, purely because they were mentioned on the back. It had to be important. I had to know why they got the first line for the hook of this story. I bought WING JONES the night Katherine Webber came to my city of Liverpool to do a book talk on strong, female characters in Waterstones and have not regretted anything, even bringing it beyond my other books to read which have been waiting for months for me to pick them up. I couldn't ignore the curiosity to read it.

Now, I got told it was like a less pretentious version of The Perks of Being A Wallflower and again, my attention was caught. That was a very special book to me too. But during the time I've been reading WING JONES, I've found that to be less true. I can certainly see why a lot of people think that but to me, both books are now important and give me a very different feel.

WING JONES is a book that makes you want to laugh hysterically and cry without care and hug your mum and fly. It makes you want to dig inside the deepest parts of yourself and find out what further things there may be in your mind and body that you can do. It makes me want to find my flight. As the younger sibling, I grew up looking up to my talented sister and I can certainly relate to Wing in that sense with her brother. Due to that, the accident that lands Marcus in hospital and his family in a very difficult and life-altering situation, pulls at my feelings. I keep wondering how I'd feel if that was my sister, the girl I'd idolized and loved and admired for her talents and everything she stood for, all shattered and doubtful. What if there was this whole other side to her that I didn't know or see, as Wing doesn't with her brother? It plays on her mind; it drags her down into a terrible negative place.  And then Wing finds her wings. And she finds them at night, with nobody watching her but the moon and her dragon and lioness, and she runs. Something unlocks in Wing at her brother's accident and then it's an amazing amount of wonder pouring out of her as each foot hits the ground, speeding her up, her worries and life falling away and there's only the track and her own heartbeat and her freedom.

Even before these first chapters of seeing and experiencing Wing running and freeing her own potential by herself (which I find incredibly crucial), I was moved. Not in the awe-filled, breathless way that I am now, but by the terrible parts of the book. And by terrible I mean the bullying coming from every racist character in it, not that the writing is terrible. Because it's not. This book is a wonder-filled story and the only awful parts are realistic context. As a girl with a mixed-race background, Wing endures daily bullying at school for her hair, her eyes, her skin colour and especially by a nasty bitch called Heather Parker. The classic bully character that makes you want to claw at the pages to shut her up. Even down to Marcus's girlfriend's dad, there is racism towards the Jones' family and his disapproval of the relationship. There's a part where Marcus's own family is denied entry into his hospital room by a receptionist who eyes them with judgement, wondering how this Chinese mother could possibly be Marcus's family. But then Wing narrates, "The woman behind the desk purses her lips, stares at Granny Dee, stares at my mother. I step forward, the missing link. The thing that connects them," and every time Wing is in that situation, everything clicks with the people judging the family. WING JONES sees an incredible, unique family that have to work together to pull through and stay strong throughout the accident. With Granny Dee from Ghana and the no-nonsense grandmother and LaoLao from China and the softer grandmother, Wing has two different and helpful role models that all try to find their ways to help what's happened. There was a part where Granny Dee gets upset and obsessive and makes a batch of apple pies for the family that was also affected in the accident and that whole chapter made me cry my eyes out in coffee shop and clutch the book tightly because of how much it hurt to see them hurting. LaoLao, too-old-to-work LaoLao, goes to help out Wing's mother in a restaurant to bring in more funding for the family that barely has anything due to hospital bills and trying to live. They all do their part in surviving the mess they're in.

Wing makes herself small in school, just seeing herself as everyone else sees her: the little sister of Marcus Jones, the football team's loved quarterback. And when Marcus kills a woman in a car accident whilst driving under alcohol influence, her school life gets worse. She's shunned, she's yelled at, hurt, and every blame that people can't throw at Marcus, Wing gets. Even for going to school each day and enduring that, Wing is an incredibly strong female protagonist, an inspirational lead for this story. But then she finds her inner strength and running becomes the thing that makes everything better, that makes the comments and the hate and the nastiness of bullies fall right off her. She finds her power and importance. Wing finds herself on the track, in old Converse shoes, and her brother's oversized jersey.

But not only does running do wonders for her self-confidence and pride in herself, she then starts getting attention from the track team in her school, with the help and encouragement of her friend (and love-interest) Aaron, Marcus's best friend. Wing befriends Eliza, the school's most adored runner, and she starts getting invited to parties and to be around the entire team that belong there. Where I'm currently up to, Wing has just won her first race and smashed the school record and it's on her birthday. There's no father to watch her proudly, no big brother to see just how good she is at running and has found her own place in the world, but she has her mother and grandmothers to watch her, cheer for her. She has friends on the team, and Aaron. Through running, her and Aaron become closer and she stops seeing herself as he'd see her (again, as just the little sister) but starts believing she could be worthy of also being Aaron's crush as he is hers.

WING JONES is a book that's become so very important to me. Earlier this week, I sat in a park that held memories for me and contemplated the chapter I'd just read and then walked around the path that circled a play area for three hours, wondering if I could capture even a hint of the freedom Wing feels when she runs. I'm far from athletic; I enjoy dancing and think I could be better at it, but this book makes me want to run and fly and see if I can find what Wing does: my own importance and place.

I think that Katherine Webber is a very important woman to write such a novel that's touched me so deeply and so full of every kind of emotion and I've not even come to the end yet. Her words and creation of her story makes the world beyond it slip away for me and I love that I've found this feeling within her book. With her imagination and talent, Katherine has made me want to think better of myself and of my achievements and that even a small amount of progress stands for something. That there's always an unlocking in order to feel free and wonderful and like you can take on the world. It's always there, whether it's on the surface and easy to know and detect, or whether you have to experience one of the hardest things in the world, to fall into a pit of darkness and feeling so small that you delve into the lowest, hardest layers of yourself to find what it is you truly are.

Wing Jones--both the book and the character--is an inspiration. It's a book I want to read a million times over and know I'll still feel breathless and inspired.

Setting: Fictional vs. Reality

As a writer, I make up my own times for my story to start. I make the world my characters live in and only use real-life seasons as a guide to show time passing. I prefer to make my own cities or kingdoms or countries; I like to discover them and what they do/how they rule and look/what religions they follow. Most importantly, I like to create their rulers.

In fantasy, my chosen genre of writing (mostly), the position of a monarch is important so I plan this a lot. What they say goes in my made-up world. For example, in my first fantasy story, The Huntress's Curse (hello, Terrin, I'll return to you one day!), my monarch was a king, closely followed by a ruthless queen. They ruled over Ayla, deciding that their view on hunters was final and to be eliminated from their kingdom. Originally, Ayla was called Glyndwr--a prospering trading kingdom that wasn't flamboyantly rich, but wasn't in poverty, either. It consisted of Port Side, and Woods Side. Any lucky (although probably unlucky) hunters still surviving and escaping the king's "death upon sight" rule, lived purely in the woods. Any hunters that still had alliances with the favoured citizens of Glyndwr got their supplies sneakily through them. Most often, these arrangements fell through and... Well, not a good ending for either side of the arrangement.

But mostly, in Glyndwr, the villagers and the hunters lived in peace. Whilst the villagers respected their king, they didn't always agree with his views on the hunting race. So a lot of the Glyndwran villagers made a deal with the hunters: they could freely buy things from their stores (or provide any sort of help required) as long as they didn't get caught, as long as the hunters never hunted in their village. Because in Glyndwr, not all hunters hunted animals. Terrin, the protagonist, for one, didn't always hunt animals. But that's her story. For now, this post is about Glyndwr's story and how I had to change it. So the deal stayed strong; the hunters never killed anyone or anything, instead finding their enemies and prey elsewhere, and continued to get their help from the purposefully ignorant villagers.

The hunters in Glyndwr lived in the woods, as I mentioned. Illeyal Woods was the barrier between Glyndwr and it's neighbouring kingdom with whom they had a loyal and fierce alliance with: Ayla. Now, Ayla was a disgustingly rich kingdom who's ruling duo liked to marry off their children as soon as possible. Their youngest and last child, a daughter named Ariadne, was their final bargaining chip, as they saw their children. So they arranged a marriage for her with the Crown Prince of Glyndwr. I liked Ayla as a pompous alternative to Glyndwr. Here, I don't mind spoiling a what becomes a bigger character because I had to scrap this story completely. In Ayla, Ariadne is shown saddened to be leaving her home, forced into this arrangement she doesn't want. It seems she's been tricked and persuaded into going to Glyndwr and has been swayed to be okay with it, through all the promises of becoming a future queen. All Ariadne wants to do is paint and discover more art, despite living in a personal solitary from watching her brothers and sisters leave her.

BUT, through the second book (this idea was a planned trilogy), Ariadne's character develops far from the lonely, woe-is-me princess of Ayla, and becomes a determined queen who thunders ahead and has her eyes on the only prize she wants: not her betrothed, but the crown itself. Thus, this makes Glyndwr's future a soft-hearted prince who wants to do right by everyone and a steel-hearted princess as his bride.

Now, here comes to present-day part.

My major fault in this extensive planning and writing that took almost two years? Glyndwr. The name. I read up about it and discovered its origins was far from what I wanted it to stand for in my story and it wasn't original at all. But through this realisation, I'd already started querying my first book to agents. This got me nowhere. So, with my changing of Glyndwr came the changing of the whole story. I rewrote, as I mentioned, but continued my original world.

Glyndwr became Ayla-- a different Ayla to the one I'd already created. Ayla became a larger place, a growing empire of sorts, and I developed my new fictional place to something I was finally comfortable with. I changed its rulers and colours, made it something completely new to base my newly redrafted story in.

The whole point of this lengthy, probably unnecessary post? I prefer the freedom of creating my own worlds, as opposed to finding an existing place and using their culture and ways for my stories. I like to make my own rules for these settings, and using real places gives me boundaries for that. I love, love, LOVE, reading about stories set in existing cultures, where it's obvious that the inspiration has come from a certain place, but for me as a writer, it doesn't work. For me as a reader, yes, yay, well done.

A quick list of my favourite books set fictionally but based on existing cultures and places:

Shadow and Bones (series) - Leigh Bardugo
Soundless - Richelle Mead
Daughter of Smoke and Bone (series) - Laini Taylor
The Raven Boys (series) - Maggie Stiefvater

Even then, these stories differ in their basis. Leigh Bardugo seems to use Russian culture and language and words and names in her books, but Ravka is a made-up place only using these ways to be formed.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is actually set in Prague (mostly), in the human realm, and I love this setting. It seriously makes me want to travel there and see the wonders described in the book for myself.

Through these type of books, I feel like I can experience the culture in a secondhand way. They encourage me to learn more about the places they're either set in, or based off. I've never wanted to travel so much as when I read these types of books.


Right, lengthy post ALMOST over!

I probably went too overboard with this blog, but I'm writing a post on my laptop for the first time (I usually blog from my phone) and I tend to get carried away, but I wanted the chance to go back and explore parts of my own little world I created. Please excuse the tour I gave (unless you liked it) and I'm actually off to work on a book review for Eleanor and Park, which is the best excuse to reread one of my favourite contemporary books and fanboy over it in the form of a review!