Wings

The story: There are two narrators, alternating every few chapters, starting from their infancy and working up to when they are teenagers. One narrator is Ian, a fairly mundane, skeptical boy. The other narrator is his brother Ben, who has known since the instant he was born (he remembers) that he was meant to have wings. Ben has an intense, obsessive need for wings and for flight. He thinks he can feel wings under his skin, itching, ready to sprout when the time is right. He believes that these wings will be not like a bird's, or an insect's, but scaly, like a dragon's. He describes this goal of his, to someday grow wings, as the most "pure and good" part of himself, and he focuses on it nearly to exclusion of everything else. It is his only goal. There's basically nothing else to his life except for this. Eventually, he changes his name to Icarus. There are many, many times in Icarus's life, even when fairly grown up, where he jumps off a high place, expecting his wings to be there to catch him. Once, out of impatience, he builds a set of wings which he says are based on those designed by Leonardo da Vinci, with some improvements of his own, but they break when he falls. He personifies Gravity as being like an intelligent, willful, demonic entity, who drags creatures downwards just out of spite. Icarus keeps wing-oriented treasures in his room. He studies all flying creatures, and his notebooks are full of technical illustrations of them. He hoards relevant knowledge. Nobody else really believes in Icarus's wings, but they pretend that they do, to humor him. In personality, Icarus has a tendancy towards both freedom and isolation. He defies rules that people follow for no decent reason. His view of the world is a mixture of meticulous scientific notes, and poetic mysticism. He is melancholic, and that sense of intellectual, wistful longing pervades the book. I completely object to the ending. (Which I won't give away here.) Normally I don't like ambiguous endings, but in this case I would have preferred an ambiguous ending. Instead, this book's ending is... unambiguous, confirmed, happy, bittersweet actually. Normally I like that kind of ending alright, but in this case it feels out of place, and most of all, its message is disturbing. The author probably didn't think of the ending as advice for the reader (other than metaphorical advice, anyway) but young kids might take it that way. That's a scary thought, since that could be dangerous. The real message seems to be that we have to do dangerous things to attain what we strive for and to set things as they should be, but that message could easily be taken wrong. The book's feel: Melancholic, wistful, philosophical, elegant, intricate, lonely, secrecy, longing. Appropriate setting for reading this book: In an attic, loft, tree-platform, or other out-of-the-way, high-up place full of mysterious little knick-knacks and antiques. Any weather. Suitable audience: Anyone who will appreciate the