by Megan Hart

This is a story about a child who is intellectually gifted, but rather a handful. She develops an affinity with a wild raven, much to her mother's chagrin. The mother comes over as very weak and unsympathetic to animals. A reason for that is revealed early on, but her insinuation that animals don't have souls really grated.

There seems to be an unnecessary emphasis on religion that doesn't really move the plot forward, as well as some embarrassingly intimate scenes between the mother and step-father that I could have done without, even graphic sex on one occasion.

I didn't like any of the characters, except the raven. He was rather interesting. The end was very dramatic, but lacked explanation or believability. This could have been an effective Horror story redolent of The Bad Seed, but despite hints being dropped like anvils it just didn't have enough creep factor in the story as a whole.

Despite all that I found the read interesting. I wanted to see what happened.

“My mad feelings just want to come out so much.”

Black Wings is a brooding tale about a mother being ravaged by her own internal feelings of guilt and the escalating terror posed by her young daughter and her new creepy raven friend. 

Briella is only ten when she begins to lose all of her childhood friends. She has a terrible “I’m smarter than everyone” attitude that doesn’t exactly sit well with, well, anyone. But she doesn’t particularly care what anyone thinks and she is quite content to do her own thing and hang out with her new raven buddy. But mom is concerned. When Briella earns a free ride to a school for the gifted her dad isn’t thrilled. He says it’s the place where they stick the weird kids. But Briella loves it. Her ego, oddness, obsessiveness and creep factor soon start to bloom out of control.

I’m just going to flat out say it. I despised this kid. She was rude, full of herself and, as I was reading, I kept thinking to myself how lucky I was that I birthed two sweet kids instead of two holy terrors. It probably could’ve gone either way, haha, but I know I would not be equipped to handle a little monster like Briella. I felt for Marion even when I wanted to give her a good shake for allowing her brat to disrespect her and everyone around her. This story is told from Marion’s point of view so we see everything from her eyes which leaves you wondering what, exactly, Briella is up to almost all the time. Marion is a little clueless and has a bad habit of ignoring all warning signs. She also talks herself out of her gut feelings out of a sense of guilt and maternal love. It’s a complicated thing, motherhood is, and this story does a great job of putting it all out there similar to the mother in Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage. I think I may have enjoyed the character of Briella more had we seen things from her perspective but alas, as written, she was an arrogant, insufferable brat with some very dangerous thoughts.

The dread hides in the shadows for a long time before horrorish things begin to happen so you’ll have to hang in there with this one. I admit I struggled at times, but I was rewarded in the last quarter. If you have a black heart you’re going to LOVE this ending. Or maybe it’s just me.

Lots of adventure in such a small book. I'm a little over the long drawn out sex scenes and without them the book was a little flat. Not horrible, just flat.

Against my better judgement, I'm thoroughly enjoying this. Female scientist gets kidnapped and taken to a space station in orbit around Mars because experiments are causing people to behave in a way similar to the disease that she has been studying on earth.

 Now, I'm 94 pages in and if I were given £1 for every time Gillian's name was mentioned I could already retire. Other than that, the writing isn't too bad if a little tropey sometimes. I think that if I take it at face value it could be a 'light' entertaining readl