This gripping science-fantasy novel tells the story of Zenya, a loyal warrior who finds herself in a crisis of faith. Zenya must fight to regain her place and begin her life again while questioning the events of her past.
The world-building in this novel is truly exceptional. Set in the city of Radezhda, we are introduced to a society where five gods lie mysteriously sleeping above the city. These gods once bestowed great technologies and wisdom, each inspiring the devotion of their own sect. However, when the gods turned away from humanity, their followers built towers to the heavens to find out why. This collective grief eventually leads to desperation and war between the sects.
Zenya, our protagonist, is a strong and determined character. As a teenager, she ran away from home to join the mechanically-modified warrior sect, determined to earn her mechanized wings and protect her people and city. Under the strict tutelage of a mercurial and charismatic leader, Zenya becomes Winged Zemolai. However, after twenty-six years of service, Zemolai becomes disillusioned with her role as an enforcer in an increasingly fascist state. After one tragic act of mercy, she is cast out and loses everything she has worked for.
As Zemolai fights for her life, she begins to understand the true nature of her sect, her leader, and the gods themselves. This journey of self-discovery is both heart-wrenching and thought-provoking. The author does an excellent job of exploring the costs of zealous faith, brutal war, and unquestioning loyalty. One of the standout elements of this novel is the complex and diverse cast of characters. Each character, from the enigmatic leader to the other members of the sect, is well-developed and adds depth to the story. The relationships between the characters are also well-written and add an emotional layer to the plot.
Overall, this book is a must-read for fans of science-fantasy and would highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a unique and immersive reading experience.

A shatteringly beautiful, harrowing, and glorious tale of faith and disillusionment, violence and redemption. Mills weaves a gripping tale about a place where mysterious beings, maybe gods or maybe something else, are worshipped, feared and adored by those in the city below. We follow Zenya who has spent her life serving what she thought was a just and righteous cause, but who now sees both her present and her past crumble. Zenya has been a loyal warrior, but now she has lost her way and more besides. Mills tells us the story of Zenya and her city by showing us both the past and present, connecting the pieces of a broken life, and a broken community. An exceptional book.

THE WINGS UPON HER BACK is the debut novel by Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus Award winner Samantha Mills. Mills won all four of those awards last year for her short story "Rabbit Test". There was an itch at the back of my mind that needed to be scratched, so I did a bit of digging around and found that she had a story in "The New Voices of Science Fiction", edited by Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman, published back in 2019. So, she's been around for at least a little while. Based on "Rabbit Test" and now THE WINGS UPON HER BACK, I believe she is going to be around for a very long time.

The setting for the story is the city of Radezhda which was founded by five gods, each of whom brought a different gift, a different discipline, to the city. Each god helped to bring prosperity and advancement to the people of Radezhda. As is the way of things, the five gods didn't always agree on things, but together they helped bring progress and improvements to the city. Until one day, the gods left the city, going high into the sky and falling into a deep sleep. The disciples of each of the gods all had something in common: the desire to determine why the gods had left them. Each of the five disciplines built skyscraper-like towers in an attempt to reach up to their god and bring them back home. The leader of each faction is called the Voice, and those leaders are the only ones that get to talk to their gods, and infrequently at that.

Eventually, and again as is the way of things, without the leadership of the gods conflicts arose, and the city came to war with itself. As each of the factions had different viewpoints, the city was being torn apart by violence. The Mechas, a warrior sect originally tasked with the job of protecting the city from outsiders, added the task of protecting the city dwellers from themselves. The Voice of the Mechas is the ruthless and power-hungry Winged Vodaya.

Zenya, the true focus of the story, is a teenager in a family that is in the scholar sect. She is unsatisfied and unhappy being a scholar. Her goal is to join the Mecha sect, get her wings, and become one of the protecters of the city. She runs away from her family and joins the Mechas, and soon shows enough aptitude that Vodaya takes Zenya under her wing (no pun intended). Eventually Zenya earns her Wings and becomes the Winged Zemolai. As time wears on, Zemolai gets weary of the constant fighting and battles and, in a rare (as in never) show of mercy, lets a spy who infiltrated the Mecha sect from the Scholar sect, go free after she discovers his treachery. This gets her Wings torn away, and she is cast out on the street with nowhere to go.

The story is told in two different timelines. One covers Zenya's story, her background, and how she came to be one of the Winged. The other is Zemolai's story after she gets cast out of the Mecha sect, and how she comes to find out that things are significantly different than she thought they were while she was one of the Winged. But there are two additional sides to the novel. One is that THE WINGS UPON HER BACK is a straightforward action adventure story, complete with a maniacal, single minded leader who is blinded by her ambition and who tries to take complete control of her domain. The other is a story of discovery, of a person learning who they are after they've achieved their life's goals, who their friends really are, and what really is going on in the world around them, the world they thought they knew well but really didn't know at all.

It's early in 2024, and there are a lot of books yet to come, many of which will be terrific. Many will come from authors that have been in the field a long time, and authors that are new. But for me, THE WINGS UPON HER BACK is the best book I've read in 2024 so far. Sure, Samantha Mills has been around a few years now, but it appears that her star is just now starting to take off. If THE WINGS UPON HER BACK is any indication, Mills will be providing us with great reads for a long time. I look forward to what she'll be bringing us in the future.

A loyal warrior in a crisis of faith must fight to regain her place and begin her life again while questioning the events of her past.

Well done and well written! Loved it!

I received an ARC of this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

What do you do when the gods you worship, the gods whose love you crave, turn their faces away from you?

The Wings Upon Her Back is a fierce, aching battle cry of a book, both cinematically epic and painfully intimate. Samantha Mills has crafted a striking world of sleeping gods, disillusioned revolutionaries, and metal wings -- and from it, she wrenches equal amounts of love and pain.

The book is simultaneously a thrilling, action-packed tale of revolution and mecha-battles between warring factions -- but also, at its heart, a searingly raw look at how different people claw their ways out (or don't) from abusive relationships -- with a mentor, with a loved one, or even with a god. It's a story about disillusionment, about rationalizing terrible actions, and about finding the difference between love and loyalty, leadership and control. While reading, I felt as though my chest were constricted for much of the book, but ultimately found it deeply cathartic.

I would describe this book as a triumphant cocktail of Fonda Lee's Untethered Sky x the Divine Cities trilogy x Some Desperate Glory. A stunning debut.

This book was provided to me as an ARC from the publisher via Netgalley.com.

This book follows the story of Zenya (Zemolai) through two different timelines and alternates between present day - her fall from power and status, and her youth/teens as she progresses towards becoming a Winged Warrior of the Mecha sect. I personally enjoyed the alternating timeline and found the stories in both interesting. It's really a story about how her past has shaped her future how she slowly takes responsibility for her failures. I thought the author has good insight into how people think and would process these things.

Unfortunately for me those were the only positive points of the book. I found the writing style frustrating at times with parenthesis interjected every few lines. It felt like I was reading someone's journal. Secondly, while I'm sure many will appreciate this, I don't think authors should use second person plural to write non-binary characters. I don't agree with this ideology in general, but at least pick a made up pronoun that doesn't make it confusing. In general the whole book felt anti-male. There wasn't a single strong male character. Every main character was either female or non-binary. Then men were either weak or bad.

The book also felt very anti-religious. The city and people are divided by sect following 1 of 5 now sleeping gods and all I can say without spoilers is the there isn't a satisfying resolution in the end in regards to their gods. That brings me to my final point. There were several plot points just left open and seemingly forgotten about. Maybe I missed it, but I don't think Zemolai ever read her brother's letters. She goes through all the trouble get them back, but then never reads them! Nikolai her brother, the only moderately important male in the book, was just written off and forgotten.

So overall I cannot say I'd recommend this book to anyone.

All of us fall victim to illusions at some point in our lives, from minor naivety to complete engrossment. As social creatures, we humans are prone to influences from outside – that’s what forms us. But what happens when the illusion is gone and we face the stark reality of what has happened and what we’ve done under that influence? How do we reconcile with that? How do we get disillusioned? Samantha Mills’ The Wings Upon Her Back explores just that.
Zemolai, a faithful warrior of the mecha god, who spent decades following her leader’s orders and patrolling the territory around Radezhda city protecting it from the outside, has a crisis. She is tired, she got old, and the so much craved in her youth wings are getting heavier and heavier. One day having returned from a patrol to the warriors’ tower for a short break in her duty, she is in pain and irritated and decides to run an unscheduled inspection of the workers in the tower. Among the possessions of one of the workers she finds an idol of a different god, a forbidden idol. She calls the worker to the quarters but cannot find it in herself to punish him – something in the man’s expression, the absence of pleading, his own weariness resonates with Zemolai. So she gives him the idol and tells him to go and burn it. However, the man takes his time to warn his accomplices and is found sitting in front of the furnace with the idol in hand. It turns out there was a whole conspiracy in the tower. Zemolai is accused of abetting the traitors and taken to be trialled by the mecha god. The god finds her guilty yet spares her life. The circuits for her wings are burnt down and she is discarded next to the hospital in the city. Proud Zemolai chooses not to go to the hospital and as the withdrawal from mechalin, a medicine that allowed her to have the ports for the wings and kept her fit, hits her, she is picked up by the rest of the traitors.
At first, the only thing Zemolai can think of is how she can get back. She plans ways to deliver the traitors to the warriors this time and fulfil her duty, even though deep down inside she understands that she will not get her wings back. But as the situation unfolds, Zemolai finds more and more proof that her years of service were guided by an illusion, by her blind following of her leader, the mecha god’s Voice – Vodaya. And this promises to be an even more destructive withdrawal than that from the mechalin.
The story is told in two timelines – we follow Zemolai as she is cast down from the warrior’s towers, gets involved in the rebel’s plot and has to get down to what’s really going on in the warriors’ sect, and the girl Zenya (Zemolai’s name before she joined the warriors) as she chooses to go against her father’s will and become a warrior instead of a scientist, her years of training, her admiration for Vodaya, who trains her, and the civil war that wrecks Radezhda city.
In some ways, the story is very claustrophobic. We barely leave Radezhda city; the warrior’s tower, the flats and tunnels where the rebels hide create an impression of rather small, constricting places. Even when Zemolai doesn’t have the wings anymore, you feel like they are still being clipped, the feathers pinched, pulled out, one by one, like the remnants of her hope, her belief. There is a lot of uncertainty – on a personal level, on the world level. Who are those gods? Why did they go to sleep? Why aren’t they responding to people anymore? What did humans do to lose their guidance? It’s all about the idols we create for ourselves. There is a lot of guilt and self-incrimination set against straightforward denial of any wrong on Vodaya’s part. As I read the story, the lyrics of one of my favourite songs by the band Poets of the Fall kept coming to mind – So how does it feel now? Tell me, can you let it go? The wrong you can’t undo. Sometimes it is almost impossible to forgive oneself, to remedy one’s mistakes and the story shows us a character who tries to deal with just that.
The Wings Upon Her Back is a wonderful story, filled with chases, conspiracies and fights blended with the personal crisis. It’s very human in nature, and I loved the whole concept of wings – mecha wings which you need to master, a heavy (in the literal sense as well – the wings are weighty) price for being able to soar in the sky, their burden, their restrictions, the wiring which they need. All of these details resonate with the main themes of the story and serve as perfect metaphors and symbols.

This is a deftly woven story of the protagonist's fall into conspiracy theory and the heinous actions they make because of it, and the difficulty of admitting to being wrong once they're so far inside--an all-too-relevant tale. It's well-told and deeply layered, with a protagonist you'll love even as you see them making wrong decisions again and again. I rooted so hard for Zenya to see the truth, but couldn't fault her for keeping to what she thought was the "proper and righteous way," even as I mourned for her, and hoped for an eventual realization of truth.

While the book was difficult to read at times (due to its relevance), it was gorgeously written with prose that flew like those gleaming wings of copper. Ultimately, though, it's a book of hope. Hope that one CAN see through the charade, that one CAN chose the correct path even after traveling so far down the wrong one. Yet it isn't blithely simplistic, either. Zenya doesn't get an easy path simply because she sees the truth; instead we're allowed to see that the satisfaction of doing the right thing, even so late in life, is the balm the soul needs to be at peace. The amazing ending is well worth the journey taken. A highly recommended read.

"If a city is a story, then ours was beautiful in its simplicity: they came to us, they loved us, they showed us how to live.
We defined ourselves by our gods!
And then our gods went to sleep."

This ARC surprised me in the best way, becoming my favourite story I've read this year, which is saying something. Elegant and masterful, it follows the same character in two parallel timelines, weaving together moments past and present that converge in a single magnificent ending. Both heart-rending and heart-lifting at once. This is a novel of bittersweet beauty, one of those rare books that must be read to be experienced as it's not easily summarized.

The closest novel I can compare it to is another favourite of mine, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine, which shares some overarching similarities (mechanical wings, gorgeous writing, political unrest) in very different ways. But if you enjoyed that book, I think you'd really like this one too and vice versa.

Radezhda is a city at war with itself. It was founded by the Five, gods who each brought unique gifts that transformed a small valley village into a place of many wonders. Each god provided detailed instructions and supervision that led to rapid improvements and expansion.

Although the gods themselves often did not agree, progress seemed endless. Happiness assured. All religions worked together, like the spokes of the great wheel that was the ever changing, always improving city.

But suddenly one day the gods retreated to their heavens and went to sleep, waking rarely. And the citizens of Radezhda have been in turmoil ever since, wondering why they left, when they will come back, and - like abandoned children - stuck in an endless cycle of wondering what they did to cause the retreat, and how they might lure the gods back. Each religious sect built tall towers up to the rifts left by the heavenly portals in the air, determined to discover why their particular god turned away from them.

Now, the Five speak only through their appointed Voice, a liaison who can visit the incomprehensible and hostile ethereal realm and relay commands, blueprints, scientific schematics and other information to the people below. But tension and unease run rife, and philosophical and political quarrels between the sects worsen into violence.

Zenya was the child of scholars who only wanted to wear the mechanical wings of the Mecha God's chosen soldiers. Originally intended to keep the city safe from the outside world, the Winged are now overtaxed trying to cope with Radezhda's unrest and its unsatisfied citizens. Although her family did not approve, Zenya devoted herself to becoming accepted among the ranks of the Winged, joining the academy and quickly becoming a part of the most elite unit, trained by Vodaya, who eventually became the Mecha God's Voice.

Her early years spent idealistically learning a new religion and earning her wings are contrasted with the disillusioned fatigue of current day Winged Zemolai, the warrior Zenya became:

"Zemolai focused on wiping down hundreds of individual feathers. They were thin and flexible and expertly wired to a hollow frame - not actual copper, but a more conductive compound developed by the creator god's finest engineers.

Zemolai didn't pray anymore, but in this way she showed her devotion. She bottled up her worries, her fears, her anger and despair, and she spent that energy on every joint, every wire, every gear. She buffed out scratches and smoothed out dents. She lost herself in the work.

A body was a machine and a machine was an extension of the body. The mecha god crafted them, and in return they crafted themselves."

As the civil unrest in the present provides a new perspective on the events of her past, Zemolai must decide who she really is at heart, what she truly believes and what is worth fighting for.

It is incredibly refreshing to follow a complex character like Zemolai through personal victory and then see the other side. What happens once a heart's desire has been achieved? What if what you thought you wanted wasn't what you thought it was at all? And if you have spent your life in service to an imperfect ideal, is there any way of making amends for the mistakes you made in good faith?

The Wings Upon Her Back is full of such thought-provoking questions, and seems especially timely amidst the current global political climate. What does it mean to have faith and keep faith in the face of challenges and changes? When you have to look within your own soul instead of relying on societal norms and narratives?

The story of Zenya/Zemolai fighting to become themselves and then struggling to come back to themselves is unforgettable and compelling and I found it incredibly moving. The author's Afterward is also very affecting. Highly recommended and I look forward to reading whatever Mills writes next!

Digital ARC provided by Tachyon Books via NetGalley in exchange for honest review; releases April 23, 2024.

Thanks also to the GR reviewer who linked Mills' free short story in Uncanny Magazine, Rabbit Test. I read this first to get a sense of Mills' writing before requesting. Another highly timely look at what abortion rights and bodily autonomy might become in the not too distant future. Also very thought provoking.

NOTE: Please visit GR review for full hyperlinks and original text formatting; quotes appear in bold.

Two stories one person. This follows the present and the past. I found the change’s difficult to follow. The plot has danger, tension, and both good and bad choices. I foun I was reading in the present and without any notice I was reading the past. Not my favorite style.

This book was different from a lot of other books I’ve read in the sense that it hit me emotionally from a different angle than I’m not usually hit at- it was a bit hard for me to follow the plot with the time jumping, which is the only reason it’s 4 stars and not 5- but the character development, world building, and pacing was done beautifully!
Review posted on Goodreads- linked below!