reviewed by
Aimee Li
Toby Bishop starts Airs Beneath the Moon with an introduction to a simple farm girl named Larkyn Hamley, who finds one of the Duchey of Oc's most precious commodities: a winged horse. From this single discovery, Larkyn's life spirals out of control and she ends up challenging the Duchey of Oc's social structure and assumptions of royalty, nobility, and wealth. Not only that, but Larkyn's winged horse is nothing like any of the other winged horses found in the Duchey.
As is designated by law in this small country, the winged horses are carefully bred to ensure their value, so the three main bloodlines of winged horses are never to be intermixed. However, Larkyn's winged horse has defining traits from two of the three bloodlines, which is not possible unless her winged horse was a mixed breed. That should be impossible and reveals a mystery rife with political intrigue and betrayal; a mystery that Phillipa Winter cannot leave alone.
So, who is the main character: Larkyn or Phillipa? Honestly, I have no idea. What was the main plot: Larkyn's challenging the social structure or Phillipa's mystery? Don't know the answer to that either. At first, I thought that Larkyn was the main character and the book was her story. Then a couple chapters later, the book focused on Phillipa and her mystery. A chapter or two later, Larkyn became the focus again with Phillipa becoming a side character. Then it flipped again. Now, Phillipa was the main character and Larkyn was a side character.
The flip-flops between Larkyn and Phillipa and their associated plots went back and forth, back and forth through the entire book. Bishop jumped between his characters and plots so frequently that I barely had time to connect what was happening to a character and her associated plot. Consequently, I was never able to form any type of bond with either of the characters or pique enough curiosity in the plots to motivate me to read more of the book.
As soon as a glimmer of something, like affection for a character or curiosity about the plot, started to develop between myself and a character or plot, Bishop switched characters and plots on me. I lost that glimmer of something with the switch and was forced to start developing it all over again with the new character or plot, which was again switched out just as that glimmer of something started developing again. This happened over and over and over again. Even the dumbest animal in the world would lose patience, get bored, and wander off after 326 pages of almost constant switching.
A backwater farm girl trying to find her place among nobles. A father dying from grief. A power hungry son. A jealous socialite. A mystery whose answer could ruin an entire country. Hints of romance. And to top it all off? Horses. Horses with wings. And only girls can ride these winged Horses.
Airs Beneath the Moon has it all, and that is the biggest problem with the book. In a genre full of copycats making bestseller lists, Bishop has copied almost everything into his book. There are so many parallels between this book and other authors, such as William Shakespeare, J.R.R. Tokien, Anne McCaffrey, and Mercedes Lackey, they became a huge distraction and made it that much harder for me to focus on the characters and plots. However, this is also the only reason I finished reading Airs Beneath the Moon. In the end, identifying the parallels became the driving force behind my finishing the book. Every time I picked up the book, I would pay more and more attention to counting the number of parallels and less and less attention to Bishop's actual characters or plot. By the time I finished the book, counting the parallels had become my new favorite game and the only way I was able to read more than one paragraph without getting distracted or bored.
About the only definitive statement I can make about Toby Bishop's Airs Beneath the Moon is that there is no closure at the end of the book. It is pretty obvious that it is meant to be the first in a series by Toby Bishop, but is Airs Beneath the Moon good enough to make me want to come back for more? Nope. Not even close.
