"Personally I don't think enough people say what they really think." (Chelsea Harrison)
I last read this book in sixth or seventh grade and I remember loving it. When I was reorganizing my bookshelves, I found the first three books in the Wings series and I couldn't remember much about it. Honestly, Wings was much better than I thought it would be.
The premise of Wings is a simple one. Laurel moves into a new town with her parents and after years of being homeschooled, starts Grade 10 at a public high school. In Biology class, she meets her first love interest, David. (Shows just how much of an influence Stephenie Meyer and Twilight had on YA literature.) One morning, Laurel wakes up with a bump on her back and later from the lump, sprouts petals. Yes, you read that right, there's a flower growing on Laurel's back. Instead of telling her parents about it, she runs to the boy that she met a few weeks ago, David, and after looking at the petal through a microscope, Laurel finds out that she's a plant. And yes, you also read that part right too: Laurel is A PLANT. And I'm a prickly cactus!
The idea of plant cells existing in a human body is certainly imaginative and I had to suspend disbelief in order to get through Wings. However, the whole concept of faerie's being plants is unique.
The characters are also flat. Laurel is a Mary-Sue, Chelsea's a honest and straightforward friend and Laurel's parents aren't really present. There's also a love triangle that I don't really care about. David is quite sweet, but I don't feel the chemistry between him and Laurel and Tamani's feelings of overwhelming love and desire towards someone who barely knows him is just too much.
And then there's the plot. The first two thirds of Wings drags as it's all about Laurel finding out that she's a plant. In the last third, the plot picks up, but I never felt that the characters were in immediate danger.
Wings has shown me how dramatically my reading tastes have changed in seven years.
"Yeah, but everyone thought Clark Kent was a nerd too, and look how that turned out." (David Lawson)