A review by ohmage_resistance
The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills

This book didn't land for me. There's kind of commentary on three different things here: extremist/high demand religious groups, the rise of fascism/political extremism, and an abusive mentor-mentee relationship. But really, it was mostly just looking at cults/high demand religious groups and the rise of fascism/political extremism through the lens of an abusive mentor-mentee relationship—which didn't work for me because those are different types of dynamics. There's similarities for sure, but there's also some important differences that Mills just ignores, which made the book's themes feel much, much weaker for me.

The biggest and most obvious difference is that an abusive mentor-mentee relationship is a one on one relationship, where cults and fascism are both social movements. Yes, they might have leaders, but they involve a lot more people in general, so the dynamics are different. Those leaders don't individually go to every follower and have toxic interpersonal relationships with them, they play people off of each other. They normalize extreme behavior/worldviews because everyone else is doing it. If I understand them correctly, cults prey on people’s desire for community/to belong, and the extreme lengths people will go to get that community. Yes, sometimes people can be ostracized/cut off from community in a cult, but that only works as a punishment because that sense of community is so strong that people are willing to do anything to “earn” their way back into it, otherwise it doesn't work. I’m mostly focusing on cult stuff here, but this is also how facsism/political extremism works—it’s social, it reinforces an in-group worldview (and cuts people off from outside worldviews, which are seen as threats), it relies on people forming a group identity not just by having a relationship with a strongman leader, but with each other as well. Even if we take the example of the far right in the US, it doesn't work just because of Trump, it works because Trump can act as a focal point for a certain group identity (MAGA) to form around. Zenya (the MC) is never part of a community, she is always an outsider. At first it’s because she comes from a scholar background, then it was because she’s too much of Vodaya’s (her mentor's) favorite, then it’s because she had a breakdown, etc. We never really see her form close bonds outside of with Vodaya (I mean, we supposedly hear that she had some sort of bond with a character she mentored, but we don’t really see that. She’s also not close to her wing-mates or whatever it was called.). The only reason she’s in the Winged is because she has a close relationship to Vodaya, she wants to protect people, and she likes flying. That’s it. She doesn't have any sort of a group identity or desire for community, because she doesn't get community from the Winged. She does get a relationship to Vodaya, but one relationship does not a community make.

I'm also going to add in, it didn't help that I didn’t buy Zemolai/Zenya as a religious character for a single second. This is relatively common for me—I grew up in a rather religious environment surrounded by other religious people (although not super extreme), and I think there’s a lot of subtle nuances to being in that sort of situation that authors (especially ones who have a more secular background) seem to really struggle to portray, at least imo. Most of the time this doesn’t bother me so much, I just ignore it, but in a book where so much of the plot depended on the MC’s (supposed) relationship to her religion, yeah, it felt super jarring to me when it didn’t really feel like she actually had a real, meaningful relationship to her religion. That plotline just fell flat, and that’s the most important plot line in the book. It kind of just felt like Zemolai remembered that she was supposed to care about the gods whenever it was convenient for the plot, but it just didn't exist in her world view or sense of identity at all beyond that. Like for example, right before the final conflict, she goes to a shrine to pray (because it's important that she's religious for the final conflict, which is part of the plot) and says she hasn't prayed in a while. Presumably this was to show the stress she was in from kind of deprogramming herself. Except, she hadn't prayed at all for the entire book until this point, praying just wasn't a part of her character at all. Again, she's only religious when it's plot relevant. I'll also add in here, organized religion is also inherently social and communal, so a lot of my sense of "she's not religious" was probably tied into the above stuff as well.

There were a lot of circumstances where I felt pretty distant to the main character or like a distant style was being used. The exception to this was the scenes of abuse from the mentor figure, which I thought were well written and powerful (later on when were were being shown Vodaya being abusive, not just being told about it). That being said, there was a lot mostly in the "honeymoon phase" sort of part of entering the warrior sect that felt skimmed over (see also the point about Zenya never really feeling like she belonged or honestly felt that happy). Also the deprogramming/deradicalization arc also felt pretty distant in similar ways, we don't see a sort of desperate hopelessness or sense of loss of community, because Zemolai never had one.

Overall, I wasn't really sold by the character work, and the plot wasn't enough to interest me when the characters and themes weren't working for me. So basically, if you're looking for a book about an abusive mentor mentee relationship, this might work. If you want commentary on extremism in political or religious groups, uh, don't expect much. 
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