TITLE: Dirty Wings
AUTHOR: Sarah McCarry
GENRE: Urban Fantasy
PUBLISHED: 15/07/2014
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Review: Dirty Wings is technically a sequel/prequel (written after but set before) to All Our Pretty Songs, but it works perfectly as a stand-alone. (In fact, I’d recommend reading it before All Our Pretty Songs, simply because Dirty Wings is, chronologically, first. And I usually prefer reading my series in chronological order.) The only thing I’d say about the issue is this: if you didn’t like All Our Pretty Songs, you won’t enjoy Dirty Wings; McCarry’s beautiful, evocative writing style is in full force here, so if you couldn’t handle it in All Our Pretty Songs, you’d better pass this one by. On the other hand, if you adored All Our Pretty Songs… You’re going to love this.
But this review is for those people who haven’t come across McCarry’s work before. To them I say: sit back and listen, because this is a book you don’t want to miss.
Dirty Wings shouldn’t work. It should be boring, a story we’ve all seen a few hundred times before: painfully shy goody-two-shoes corrupted/set free by lovable bad girl, discovers her true self, fights with parents, sails off into the sunset, yada yada yada. And on the surface, that’s all this is. But it’s the depth to which McCarry’s examines the various facets of this oh-so-familiar story – not to mention the brutal honesty regarding what her examinations turn up – that makes Dirty Wings stand out.
Well. That, and her signature poetic writing style that makes me swoon with adoration and bile-green envy. But we’ll get to that in a minute; let’s take a look at our characters.
Maia is a young woman who has been home-schooled by an oppressively strict mother and more or less fondly forgotten about by her alcoholic father. For a long time, all she’s really had is her piano, and her amazing skill with the instrument; she has no friends and is completely oblivious to pretty much everything – from non-classical music to make-up. But occasionally, this seems like a fair trade for the way she plays -
her hands moving like light on water, like waves against the shore, like a shipwreck, like drowning.
She is also Vietnamese, adopted (or ‘bought’, as Maia puts it several times) to be her mother’s doll, the stereotypically perfect Asian daughter to a Caucasian family. This is rife with its own issues, obviously, and Maia’s coming to terms with what this really means was one of my favourite sub-plots of the novel. One scene is particularly heart-wrenching, when Maia realises that the waiter in the Vietnamese restaurant her father has taken her to is not mumbling, but trying to speak to her in Vietnamese.
Whatever moment Maia had had before, with her singing friend, is gone forever. She’d thought he’d liked her for no special reason, for her her-ness, and now she doesn’t know what it was he saw, and she never will know, because her father ruined it and because no one has ever taught her the tongue she was born to, the language of a home she’s never seen and probably never will. What would Cass do? Dad. Fuck off. But for all the things Cass knows, she’ll never know what it’s like to feel like this.
Which neatly brings us to Cass. Cass, short for Cassandra, is at first glance as much of a stereotype as Maia: where Maia is the Good Asian Daughter, Cass is That Punk Kid, with her crazy dyed hair, her penchant (and impressive skill) for shoplifting, and her homelessness. Having run away long ago from a tragically useless mother, Cass squats with a number of other teenagers and young/new adults with interesting names -
Maia doesn’t comment on the names of Cass’s friends, doesn’t ask why all of them decided to be nouns instead of people. It seems obvious, anyway. A name like Felony was a disguise you could step into, along with your torn black clothes and steel-toed boots. Felony, Crowbar, Digger, Chainsaw, Mayhem. With names like those to live up to, you had to be tougher than you actually were until you actually were that tough. Tougher than parents, tougher than teachers, tougher than cops. Tougher than adults and norms and the riptide of your past. Tougher than all your ghosts.
I hope you’re getting some idea of how glorious the writing is. A beautiful little snippet from the same passage perfectly encapsulates Cass while continuing on with the importance of names.
Cass herself dropped fey and prissy andra for the brevity of Cass, one syllable, sharp and short. Cass could be a thing that cuts or strikes. The hard edge of a stone. Cass is mean where Cassandra is feeble. Cassandra: always predicting trouble and too much of a girl to do anything about it. Cass? Nobody fucks with Cass.
The thing is: neither of these two are stereotypes. I think McCarry’s whole point is that there are no stereotypes: people are just people, once you let them out of their boxes or look a little deeper. On the surface, that’s what Dirty Wings is about, but it’s not, really. It’s a love story, between two girls (like All Our Pretty Songs, Dirty Wings has a strong lesbian element running subtly through – less subtle than in All Our Pretty Songs, which I appreciated). It’s a love story between those girls and the world – Maia, discovering how incredible life can be for the first time, and Cass, rediscovering it all over again with Maia. It’s a book about music – especially punk and rock, as music genres and lifestyles and fashions. It’s a retelling of the Persephone myth, a deep, rich undercurrent running beneath everything else, subtle until it really isn’t.
Aside from the writing style, what makes Dirty Wings special is this: it is a coming-of-age story without the censoring. Without the morals. Maia is all set to attend the best music school in the country, the prelude to what will be a glorious musical career; in her rush of ‘self-discovery’, she throws it all away. But even though the adult characters around her – especially her music teacher, Oscar, one of the best characters in the story – condemn her for this, there’s no sense that McCarry is attaching any moral to it. The condemnation of the characters is entirely separate from the author’s feelings, whatever those might be. There is no stigma in McCarry’s writing: not against Maia and Cass’ love for each other; not against Cass’ lifestyle; not against Maia’s choices to rebel (even when that rebellion leads to every parent’s nightmare); not even against the prolific drug use that goes on. If anything, several passages glorify it;
What Cass loves even more than letting go is saying yes. Yes to every bad idea, to every drug, to every possible thing; yes to wide horizons, yes to euphoria, yes to the wants of the animal body. Yes to running wild in the night, yes to being monster more than girl, bare teeth and nails like claws and muscles like a wolf’s.
Since Dirty Wings is billed as a Young Adult novel, this makes it extremely unusual. But it also makes it incredibly honest. I’m not trying to advocate drug use, but let’s be fair: people wouldn’t use them if they didn’t enjoy it, right? McCarry acknowledges that, and the way drugs like speed make people feel, without condemning it. Maybe it would be different if any of the characters presented as addicts, self-destructive or turning to violence to get their fix, but nobody does. It’s all party-drugs, and in this McCarry’s image is close to the truth: they feel good and do no real harm, so long as everyone’s safe. It’s an unusual message to find, but I’m always happy to find authors not trying to shove Puritan ideals down my throat, so McCarry gets points for it.
The story back-and-forths between ‘Then’ and ‘Now’, simultaneously telling the tale of the beginning of Maia and Cass’ friendship, and the ‘Now’ that eventually leads into the events of All Our Pretty Songs. Much of the novel is taken up by the road-trip Maia and Cass take one summer, wonderfully magical without being picturesque or cliché. It’s the relationship between the two girls, though – their friendship, and their love – that magnetises each page and draws the reader in.
“Goodnight, Cass,” she says, her heart full of love that can’t find its way to her tongue. How can you ever tell a person all the things you feel for her? Goodnight warrior, goodnight queen, goodnight girl who set me free.
The two of them are just fantastic. Maia is bedazzled by the worldly Cass, and Cass genuinely enjoys inducting Maia into the world as it exists, not the one Maia’s mother strives to create. Several times the book had me laughing out loud at Maia’s kittenish innocence and Cass’ responses to it.
“Do you know how to do makeup?” she asks. “I got eyeliner. But I don’t know how to put it on, really.”
“Do I know how to do makeup,” Cass says. “Girl, please.”
I suppose it might be funnier in context. By this point in the book, I could hear Cass’ particular brand of fond sarcasm, and it had me grinning like an idiot as I read on the bus.
Maybe a better example would be Maia’s first rock concert;
“Is it all like this?” Maia asks Cass.
“WHAT?” Cass shouts.
“IS IT ALL LIKE THIS?” Maia shouts back.
“IS ALL WHAT LIKE THIS?”
“ROCK MUSIC?”
Cass laughs so hard she doubles over, and Todd looks over at Maia, amused. Wheezing, Cass shakes her head. “COME ON, PRINCESS,” she yells. “LET’S GO OUTSIDE.”
In the yard, the din is considerably less, although the crowd is no smaller…“You don’t have to come out here,” Maia says to them. “If you liked it.”
Cass is still laughing. “Are you kidding? They’re fucking terrible.”
I don’t want to say too much about the fantasy element. Yes, it’s present. But as in All Our Pretty Songs, it’s faint and secret until close to the end. The same magical happenings play a much bigger role in All Our Pretty Songs, but it’s still undeniably fantasy. It’s just that it’s not that important, in the grand scheme of why this novel is so excellent.
Like the writing. The lush, incredible way McCarry has with words, that occasionally makes her books feel like reading a poem, and constantly seems to perfectly describe what it’s like to be young and in love and coming alive for the first time.
Maia nods, her bleached hair swinging. Cass wonders if there’s such a thing as glow-in-the-dark dye, if she could mark Maia somehow, so as to be always able to find her, no matter how heavy the night.
She’s never played the Ravel so well, and she wishes that Oscar could see her now, her hands moving like light on water, like waves against the shore, like a shipwreck, like drowning. And then she isn’t wishing anything at all; she is the water, the deep green roar, the mermaid singing her lover down to darkness, the lover falling. Come drown with me and be my love. She stumbles a little in the right hand but keeps going. She plays like the night is moving through her body, plays like a tidal wave. Plays for all the journeys down into the dark she’s ever taken, all the lonely nights spent underwater, plays her regrets as salt-stinging as ocean spray, plays to a still deep place where the sunlight cannot filter down.
She is the mermaid, she is the lover, she is Ravel dreaming over poetry in the dark, she is the keys, the strings vibrating, she is the wood of the hammers falling and the brass of the pedals and the charged atoms of the air whirling past her, she is the waves of sound, she is particles bright and living, she is shattering and coming together, she is breathing the music, she is transcendent, she is divine. She is outside of time, outside of her body, giving over to whatever force has taken hold of her, whatever moves through her now and draws her hands across the keys, she is flickering in and out of being, now human, now something else, now sound, now echo, she is breathing light, she is breathing light, coming through the first passage and into the second, and the right hand is perfect, perfect, the tremolo magnificent, her fingers sweeping through the glissando and reaching again for the chords.
See? Poetry. That poetry gained All Our Pretty Songs a lot of mixed reviews, because apparently there are people who don’t enjoy that writing style. I adore it. McCarry’s writing is something you can dive into; it takes you over and makes you live the emotions she’s trying to convey. It’s unbelievably wonderful, and I really hope she writes a million more books because I don’t see how I could ever get enough of it.
As it stands, Dirty Wings has not yet been published; it’s not out until July. But after reading it, I immediately went and pre-ordered it. This is definitely a book – and an author – that I want to support with my pocket-book, and I very much hope that everyone else will too.
So glad you liked it, really hope you like the book too! ^^