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Magonia Hardcover – 27 April 2015
Maria Dahvana Headley
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Product details
- Publisher : HarperCollins US (27 April 2015)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0062320521
- ISBN-13 : 978-0062320520
- Reading age : 12 - 17 years
- Dimensions : 15.24 x 2.67 x 22.86 cm
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Best Sellers Rank:
507,485 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 327 in Children's Books on Illness
- 893 in Fiction About Death & Dying for Young Adults
- 1,443 in Epic Fantasy for Young Adults
- Customer Reviews:
Product description
Review
"The painful, sarcastic beauty of Aza's interactions down below in the everyday world begs comparisons to John Green's The Fault in Our Stars."--Kirkus Reviews
"With lush writing, memorable world building, and an array of peculiar characters, this is sure to thrill readers looking for a distinctive, imaginative tale in the vein of Laini Taylor and Neil Gaiman."--Booklist
"The book races to an epic confrontation that will leave readers thrilled... romance, danger, and world-building combine."--School Library Journal
"The sweeping, lyrical language in both parts of the book is captivating, with haunting scenes woven from carefully chosen, sharply evocative descriptions."--Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
"Magonia hooked me from the first page. It has an amazing voice, brutal and hopeful both at once, and a beautiful, unique mythology. Wonderful."--Django Wexler, author of the Shadow Campaigns and The Forbidden Library
"Magonia is magical. A high-flying, refreshing, and literally out-of-the-blue fantasy with great characters, emotional depth, and a unique fantasy world that I never saw coming."--Victoria Aveyard, #1 New York Times Bestselling author of Red Queen
Maria Dahvana Headley is a firecracker: she's whip smart with a heart, and she writes like a dream.--Neil Gaiman, bestselling author of The Graveyard Book and Coraline
From the Back Cover
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.
All the doctors can do is give her drugs and hope they keep her alive. So when Aza catches a glimpse of a ship in the sky, her family chalks it up to a cruel side effect of the 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. The sickness catches up with her.
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 she can use it to change the world.
As she navigates her new life, Aza discovers that war is coming. Magonia and Earth are on the cusp of a reckoning. In Aza's hands lies the whole of humanity--including the boy who loves her. Where do her loyalties lie?
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I bought it ages and ages ago, but it’s been sitting on my Kindle for so long that I’d totally forgotten what it was about. Like, completely forgotten. I didn’t read the blurb before I started it, so I just went into it blind. And I think this is the best way to read Magonia.
So the book starts off by introducing us to Aza Ray, our protagonist. She is snarky and sarcastic and - bummer - suffers from a life-limiting lung condition.
I know. There I was thinking, ‘A book about a sarcastic girl with lung problems. Haven’t I already read this book?’ (and yes, I have, and it’s called The Fault in our Stars)
Except fairly soon in, Magonia takes a massive swerve off the dying-teen plotline and makes a dramatic u-turn into BizarroWorld.
I kind of want to talk about it, and I kind of don’t. I really think the best way to read Magonia is to know nothing about it on the way in. Ultimately it wasn’t my favourite read of the year, but the ‘Say - WHAT??’ part was really what kept me turning those pages.
The absolute best thing about this book is its imagination. It’s absolutely bonkers. And while the author lifted part of the premise of the book directly from Bishop Agobard’s work ‘On Hail and Thunder’, she chose a pretty obscure text to model her book on and she introduced enough bizarre stuff of her own to make me lift my eyebrows in impressed-ness.
I want to say it’s a unique book, but I just can’t make myself get over the fact that she lifted the concept of Magonia from someone else. If that hadn’t been the case, this book would have got a whole extra star.
I thought Aza Ray and Jason were okay protagonists. Aza Ray is a bit moany (and okay when she’s on earth and drowning in her own lungs then she’s maybe got something to moan about) and her narrative is a bit rambly but I liked that she made decisions and moved the plot along instead of just letting stuff happen to her. Jason was okay. I finished this book a couple of days ago but already I can’t remember much about him other than vague thoughts that he was quite a nice guy and super intelligent.
I’ve read some reviews where people have been thrilled about how beautiful this book was and how moving. I’m glad they thought that way, but it’s not really something that I picked up on. The narrative was a bit drifty and wander and I never really understood things like the ((({{{ ]}}}))) brackets thing. Some people love that stuff; I’m not so much of a fan.
It’s hard to know who to recommend Magonia to. I’ve seen lots of reviewers whose opinions I’ve always agreed with differ wildly in their opinions of it. I thought it was fine. It didn’t blow me away, but I really appreciated the crazy imaginativeness of it.
3 stars

Aza doesn't quite work in our World. She has a condition so confusing and bizarre to the medical community that they've named it after her (it's obviously fictitious) and are combatting her breathlessness and mostly complete inability to make her lungs function as best as modern science will allow. Aza's mother works endless hours in ten labs trying to find a cure, her best friend (and cute crush) Jason spends countless hours researching what he can and distracting her from her inevitable death, whilst her teachers do their best to ignore her sarcastic remarks and the fact that she's a ticking time bomb.
I know what you're thinking - standard sick teenager read. But it isn't. Aza doesn't work in this world because she's designed to breathe in another. Magonia. And when she eventually does leave our world, we get to see it too. Aza had been "hallucinating" ships in the sky. But they're not hallucinations at all and she is swiftly sucked in to the ship as part of their crew. It seems what she thought she knew about herself may be way off the mark.
There are loads of brilliant ideas here. Magonia to me seems like it could be taken in two equally great ways - either it's a take on Heaven, or it's actually a fantastical world for sick people to be rescued to. And my God, how many sick kids and their families out there wouldn't kill for this to be true. This really resonated with me and I absolutely love it.
I also like that this wasn't a typical sad story. Of course it's tragic, but the tragedy of it is over quickly so that the real story can take hold. In fact, some of the more touching moments surrounded the complexity of Aza missing her family in her semi-dead state.
Equally there are some really cool characters aboard the ship - they sound like Avatars, all blue and nimble, but have a language allowing them to communicate with all the birds living in and around Magonia - or inside Aza's chest! Something for you to discover more about yourself. The main guy character, Dai, helping Aza adjust, annoyed me a little for being the typical cocky guy, but I was able to forgive this thanks to the exciting characters and creatures aboard.
What I struggled with was the world building. I can hardly tell you what the ship looks like, the wonders of Magonia and what Aza was seeing. It was limited in that area of the storytelling. I also struggled with some of the concepts because they weren't fleshed out enough or explained well. I'm all for an alternate world with talking birds and blue people, but I wanted to know the how's and why's as well and these were largely missing. Despite this, I guess I like that my imagination was able to fill in the gaps, particularly with the heaven concept. The underpinning story is good, with quick pacing and unique ideas. It's just a bit weird in places - a bird in her chest? That's cool, but explain it to me better so that I buy into it.
Overall, I think this is an interesting and definitely unique look at fantastical worlds, the after life, ships in the sky and portrays a nice message that all isn't lost just because you don't seem to fit in right now. I just wish it had been developed a little bit better - I hope that the sequel will answer everything I've yet to discover. Definitely worth a read.



Magonia has a strange setting. It follows a girl who seems to be drowning in air because it has more oxygen and pollutants than she can handle. She's never had much of a life expectancy. And then the worst comes true. Except, not really. While her family and her best friend, Jason, think she's dead, she's actually been taken to Magonia, a land in the sky. She travelling on a ship, she can finally breath, and she finds out she's more powerful than she ever imagined.
And when I said strange, I meant many things. For one, the fact that the protagonist dies within the first quarter of the novel (I totally cried), then there's the world-in-the-sky thing and the flying-ship thing. Finally, there are bird people. It's all quite fascinating.
I loved being introduced to the world of Magonia and how it's based on speculation and conspiracy theories of historical events, like how people put their own twist on Jack the Ripper (I'm reading a Jack the Ripper book night now). I love when authors do that. It makes it seem as if the world they've created really exists. Or could exist. So much fun to read.
The characters in the novel were great. I love Aza and her quirky and sarcastic personality, and I loved Jason with his obsessive nature, his determination, and his loyalty toward his best friend.
The romance between Aza and Jason was super cute. Right off the bat we're shown how much they love and care about each other. They have a very strong bond and I was rooting for them the entire time. Even though the author decide to test my patience by introducing another guy and creating a love-triangle-ish situation, because YA authors just can't help themselves.
I actually had a few problems with the author. There was, of course, the (mandatory) love-triangle. But there were things happening that made me not like Aza as much. You see, the author needed the plot to move a certain way. For that to happen, Aza needed to act a certain way and let certain things happen. Which required Aza to let herself be very easily manipulated, and for a very long time. It was beyond irritating to see a smart character like Aza be fooled like that. Why couldn't the author have found a different way for the plot to move along?
The other problem I had, the singing. In this book, Magonians have power in their voice. It's like Harry Potter but instead of waving their wands, they sing. It was a wonderful idea to give power to singing. But it was hard to take it seriously.
We didn't know what or how they were singing. We weren't really give any cues as to what the musical notes were like. We they birdy or opera? For all we know, they could've been beat-boxing (okay, that was a joke). And Aza learnt so quickly. She actually just knew how to do it. It was like being hit over the head with both the Special Snowflake trait and the Chosen One trait, at the same time. Quite annoying.
Overall though, I liked the book. But when you think about it, it relies pretty heavily on the novelty of how intriguing the world is. Something that's proven by the fact that the second book hardly has any reviews with over three stars. It basically uses the same screw-with-your-characters-to-drive-the-plot technique this one uses. But since the world is no longer new, it's harder to forgive. I'm not reading the second book for that reason.
This book, I do recommend. It's interesting, has a good story, is well-written, and has great characters (not just talking Aza and Jason).