Review of Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley

Advance Review of Maria Dahvana Headley's Magonia

Release Date: April 28th, 2015

Synopsis as found on GoodReads.com:


Neil Gaiman’s Stardust meets John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars in this fantasy about a girl caught between two worlds…two races…and two destinies.

Aza Ray is drowning in thin air.

Since she was a baby, Aza has suffered from a mysterious lung disease that makes it ever harder for her to breathe, to speak—to live.

So when Aza catches a glimpse of a ship in the sky, her family chalks it up to a cruel side effect of her medication. But Aza doesn’t think this is a hallucination. She can hear someone on the ship calling her name.

Only her best friend, Jason, listens. Jason, who’s always been there. Jason, for whom she might have more-than-friendly feelings. But before Aza can consider that thrilling idea, something goes terribly wrong. Aza is lost to our world—and found, by another. Magonia.

Above the clouds, in a land of trading ships, Aza is not the weak and dying thing she was. In Magonia, she can breathe for the first time. Better, she has immense power—and as she navigates her new life, she discovers that war is coming. Magonia and Earth are on the cusp of a reckoning. And in Aza’s hands lies the fate of the whole of humanity—including the boy who loves her. Where do her loyalties lie?  


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Excerpt from Magonia:


I breathe in. I breathe out. The sky's full of clouds. A rope is looping down from above, out of the sky and down to earth. There is a woman's face looking at me, and all around us, hundreds upon hundreds of birds. The flock flows like water, surging up and into the air, black and gold and red, and everything is safe and cold, bright with stars and moon.


I'm tiny in comparison. and I'm not on the ground.


I know everyone has dreams of flying, but this isn't a dream of flying. It's a dream of floating, and the ocean is not water but wind.


I call it a dream, but feels realer than my life.


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This book is so unlike any book I have ever read before. The premise was incredible and I was hooked from the very beginning. I can definitely see the comparison to The Fault in Our Stars, but the similarity doesn't last very long. This book is certainly in a category all its own.


Aza is dying. Of what, no one knows. No one has ever seen anything like it before and every Doctor is stumped on how to save her. She is about to turn 16, but the Doctor's have said many times that she wouldn't live to see another Birthday. So she is used to thinking every day could be her last. It comes as quite a shock when she actually does die.


She wakes up somewhere she is unfamiliar with. When a woman who looks like an Owl (an actual bird/human hybrid) starts caring for her, it is no surprise that she freaks out. The woman is a Rostrae, one of the winged class who can shift from fully bird, to partially bird. Aza is on a ship in the sky full of these bird people as well as other alien looking people. These people are Magonians. They are able to sing magic into being... and Aza is no longer on land, she is in their world, Magonia.


Aza quickly finds out that the family she has left behind was never really her family at all. She was kidnapped as a baby and switched with a human child. She lived in a human skin, but her body was never made to live on land. That is why she seemed as though she was dying. Her body could not properly breath Oxygen. The Captain of this ship has been searching for her for 15 years... because she is the daughter of the Captain, Zal Quel. She is Aza Ray Quel.


Why, if this is really her home, can she not stop thinking about the best friend she left behind, Jason, whom she has always been in love with? Why can she not stop wishing to be with her family on earth? Zal has wanted Aza for something and it sure doesn't seem like its because she missed her. What is really going on?


This book opened up a whole new world to me. A floating world that is right above us amongst the clouds. I am excited to see where Headley takes this series. I am a huge fan and this is only her first foray into teen... Exciting prospects await!!