Book Review: Pigs Don't Fly by Mary Brown

Title:  Pigs Don't Fly
Author:  Mary Brown
Series:  Pigs Don't Fly #2
Genre:  Fantasy
Pages:  384

Rating:  C+

Synopsis from goodreads.com:  Left an orphan with a small dowry and a magic ring, all Summer wanted was to find a husband. But first, a raggle-tail assortment of creatures needed her help--particularly the flying pig and the handsome amnesiac blind knight...

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I first heard about Pigs Don't Fly while browsing through Barnes & Noble's website.  The book was out-of-print, so of course they didn't actually carry it, and I forgot about it for years.  Then I found it on paperbackswap.com recently, and I was so excited to read it.  Perhaps my expectations were too high, because I thought the book was just okay.

The characters are interesting and different.  Summer is an educated peasant girl, almost unheard of in her world, and she's compassionate and caring towards others.  But she's also obese, naive, and stubborn.  She gets a crush on a blind knight (which she's happy about because he can't see how fat she is) who needs her help to find his way home, and she picks up a ragtag crew of misfit animals on the way.  The animals are actually more interesting characters than the humans.

The story itself is all-over-the-place with a very thin plot.  But it had lots of small, fun adventures that were entertaining.  The biggest problem with the story as a whole was the ending.  It felt rushed and thrown-together at the last minute, like the author had no more ideas and just needed an out.

And then there's the insta-love.  These two characters had nothing between them at all (they're not even the same species during most of their adventures), and once they kiss, they magically fall madly in love with each other. Hates it!  And I was actually thrown by all the sexual references made throughout the book.  There was nothing explicit fortunately, but there's still a lot more than I expected.

Pigs Don't Fly is an okay book.  It's moderately entertaining; the animals are the story's saving grace.  It would have been better as a series of short stories rather than one book.  C+