Review: Black Wings Beating

Black Wings Beating by Alex London
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings: parental abuse, religious discrimination, racism.

I'm actually a little...disappointed...in how this book turned out for me. The first time reading a new Alex London book since Guardian, almost half a decade ago, and I wasn't super invested in it? Like...WTF happened? I mean, that's not to say the book is a total stinkbomb. It's much more readable for its characters, especially Brysen and Kylee. But especially Brysen, #ownvoices gay as he is...and just like with Syd in the Proxy duology, London writes him as both Black (or, at least, Black-coded, and biracial Black- and white-coded at that) and gay, but takes care to ensure that neither his skin color nor his sexuality be his sole defining characteristics. (Unlike Proxy, this is also a very queer-friendly world. While Syd has to put up with rampant homophobia including heavy use of futuristic slurs, here, nearly nobody bats an eye at Brysen going out with another boy, and heterosexuality isn't treated as the default either.) Kylee, though, reads more like she stepped into this book from the world of This Savage Song - she's cut from some of the same cloth as Victoria Schwab's Kate, so I feel like she's very hard to like...hard, but not impossible.


That said, though, the plot of this book proved very hard to follow, and often felt nonexistent at times as well. More often than not, I found myself wondering what the hell was going on, and getting pretty well distracted by frequent flashbacks to the abuse Brysen suffered at his father's hands - abuse which at least partially stems from racism (the classic case of the white parent having children with a Black person and hating the result, at least so the coding implies), and possibly from homophobia as well, because Da is just that much of an asshole. As for the main plot, though...I'm still not sure I could tell you what it was all about. Searching for a mythical bird that could turn the tables in the whole falconry game, sure...but then this cult of owl-themed nuns and their vampire-child charges comes into play and that's when London really starts to lose me. Not to mention the occasional interludes looking into some other group that's made clear to be some kind of threat, and yet they have almost no intersection with Kylee and Brysen's main plot?

I swear, this entire book is just a Prolonged Prologue.

Though hopefully that'll mean the second book is where London really steps up his fantasy game.

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