Review: Fledgling

Fledgling by S.K. Ali
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This much hyped YA dystopian piece, the first of a planned duology, takes the reader to a futuristic world heavily inspired by Arabia and Persia - hell, if not for Rumi’s poem about how “hope is the thing with feathers,” this book might not exist in the form under which it’s currently out in the world. Unlike a lot of examples of the genre, this book follows a great deal of POV characters, with a certain core three emphasized from the start, and several more joining the fray over time. Also unusually, the closest POV, the one that’s most noticeably in typical YA dystopian first person present tense, is that of an Upper Earth princess with tons of shelter and privilege in her life, though she quickly learns just how downtrodden the people of Lower Earth are. While the multiple POV’s are somewhat to this book’s detriment, especially after more of them join in and it’s harder to tell some of them apart, this book is still very fast paced for being over 500 pages, and builds up to a pretty bleak ending. Hopefully the sequel will offer a little more hope for some of these revolutionaries, because they’ll need it for if they win. (And that’s a big “if…”)

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