Trucker Man Reads Girly Books: WINGS, by Aprilynne Pike

TMRGB is a blog series wherein I, a bearded HazMat trucker and blast crewman, recommend effeminate fiction to the masses. Note to hipsters: this is what real irony looks like. Note to young male readers: don’t feel bad for liking girl books. A good book is a good book.

 

It’s February, so it’s fitting that you’d read romance this month. Let me recommend to you the debut paranormal romance series by Aprilynne Pike, a NYT best-seller.

The Wings series is about a girl named Laurel who finds out that she’s a faerie. Whoops! Spoiler? Well no, it’s on just about every description of the book, including the jacket flap, but it’s a revelation to Laurel, who finds out a few chapters in.

The story develops well over the course of the first three books, which span multiple years of Laurel’s high school life. The fourth book takes place in the span of a single day, and justifiably so, as there’s a lot going on. The fifth book, ARABESQUE, happens several years after the conclusion of the original series. I have not finished reading it yet; Pike was posting chapters weekly online, and I read several of them while sitting in a CAT skidsteer on a construction site in Nevada, waiting for clearance from the city to blow up part of the hillside. But that’s neither here nor there.

Now, I won’t regale you with tales of the manly exploits I undertook as I read each novel. I won’t bore you with how I had a fierce cold on a road trip in 2010, and while I was trying to burn it out of my body with the heater on full blast, driving in my AWD wagon across the desert at 80 mph in the dark, I listened to WINGS on audio, and was swept away to the Redwood forests of California, where Laurel lived with her adoptive parents. Nor will I emphasize the fact that I burned through DESTINED whilst camping in a tent on a manly campout with other dudes. My bonafides neither augment nor detract from the merits of these series. It’s worth the read, no matter who you are.

I recommend you read it because it’s good fun. It tickles the love-bone we all have. It’ll fly you back to your teenaged years with no small degree of fondness, and the added benefit of a fun fantasy plot involving Avalon, faeries, trolls, and magic makes it even more enjoyable. As much as I like these books, they’re not even Pike’s best (those reviews are to come later.)

So if you need a good romantic plot to pick at this month, start with WINGS and see where it takes you.

In matters of content warning, be advised that there’s an S-bomb in book one, but this doesn’t happen again in the rest of the series. Other than that, you’ve got teenagers making out in bedrooms and stuff, that’s about as far as it goes.

‘Til next time! Keep on truckin’.