Navigating high school is hard enough… how would you manage if you suddenly discovered that you weren't human?

In Wings, Laurel's just another homeschool kid raised by hippies, struggling to get through her first weeks at public high school, when she finds a plant growing out of her back. Seriously. Luckily her bud David is a biology nerd, and they begin to unravel the mystery together—only to discover that the thing on her back is part of her heritage as a faerie.

And that's just the beginning—we won't spoil it, but trust us when we say this book will suck you in. And when it does, you'll join the swarm of people who loved Wings so much when it was released in 2009 that it not only became a New York Times bestseller, but author Aprilynne Pike turned it into a series, writing three books to follow it (source). Not too shabby for a debut novel, now is it?

So what's the draw? We get some romance, some adventure, a bunch of magic and mystery, and plenty of teenage angst—there's even a school dance with fancy outfits and glitter—and there are also a couple of murder attempts and some science sleuthing (complete with microscope and tissue samples) to spice things up, too. Plus we get a glimpse of a love triangle starting to form, which is always a good time.

Wait… what do all the things in the last paragraph remind us of? You got it: Twilight. Love it or hate it, we're mostly just happy that Laurel is less clumsy than Bella. Stephenie Meyer, author of Twilight, even reviewed Wings and called it "a remarkable debut." In other words, this book's reader tested, Twilight approved.

Now that we dropped the "T" word, we're thinking that there are enough similarities between Wings and Twilight that if you liked Twilight, you should totally read Wings. But there are enough differences that if you didn't like Twilight, you still just might enjoy Wings. Oh, heck, just read Wings either way. We're fans of the book's fresh take on faeries, friendship, and family.

Every teen feels awkward and out of place, but when Wings' protagonist Laurel finds out she's not even human, well, that takes the cake. Technically, as a faerie, she belongs to the same biological category as plants do. Which, yeah, we agree, is a pretty strange thing to have to come to terms with.

When the mysterious bump appears on Laurel's back and begins to grow, she's totally freaked out, wondering if it's cancer or a tumor or what. And for a lot of people, this is like going through puberty in general: You don't have a roadmap for what to expect and the changes happening to your body are weird and sometimes icky.

Look, we don't want to harp on the whole Laurel's-freaky-changing-body-is-a-metaphor-for-every-teenager's-freaky-changing-body connection too much, but it's totally a thing. Just go back and reread the parts about the flower growing out of her back and how she feels ashamed and wants to hide it, and you'll see where we're going with this.

It's important, too, to look at what Laurel does once she learns the truth about her identity as a faerie. She's got problems, yeah, but she steps up to defend her friends, family, and land. She's totally brave in the face of a family crisis, death threat, and romantic woes, despite being weirded out about her non-human identity. It makes us think that if Laurel can get her act together and be awesome, so can anyone, even the angstiest of angsty teenagers. And that's a message we can totally dig.