This fantasy/adventure satire novel breathes new life into the classic Gulliver’s Travels and makes it relevant for the modern day.
Cygnus embarks on a travel adventure like no other. He meets strange people and animals then learns of their unusual ways of governing, living, and worshiping, but they all eventually grow tired of him being there, and he is forced to leave. Through all this, he learns there is no place like home.
Cygnus wasn’t afraid of flying on airplanes, but when he boarded a plane, it was rather unlucky for him and the other passengers. He was lucky to survive his first plane crash and even luckier to find land to get out of the water. But was he so lucky?
How strange it would be to find oneself on an island full of civilized horses and feral people (yahoos) when you are an educated human. The horses find it strange, the Yahoos want to beat on him, and Cygnus just wants to go home.
One strange island full of even stranger residents would be enough for me to never leave home again once I had managed to return there. But he doesn’t find a way home yet, not even when these strange residents become tired of him.
On to another unusual place he goes, and this one is resided in by immortals. Next he is in a land of necromancers. The Lilliputians, the little people, are my favorite though. Cygnus is so much larger than they are, yet they manage to find enough food to feed him daily. I mean, he eats more than a thousand times what they do. Anyone should be able to figure out that they wouldn’t be able to keep that up for long.
This is an entertaining read that is sure to keep your attention, and the actions of the inhabitants of each of these islands will cause you to look at and examine more closely the world we live in.
I was sent a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. If you would like to read this modern-day telling of Gulliver’s Travels—and I highly recommend this book for homeschool students—I’ve provided an Amazon link for you below.
Amazon Link: On Swift Wings: The Travails of Cygnus
Favorite Sentences:
The shadows of the cords and masks give the feeling of a dark jungle with vines dangling from thick foliage.
At almost the first movement, before I thought I had even made the slightest whisper, she whipped her head around and glared at me like a deer in the forest upon the slightest snap of a twig.
I heartily drank the water as though it were Juan Ponce de Leon’s fountain of youth.
My keepers were most enthusiastic to hear about how a world ruled by Yahoos could function.
It would seem I have a habit of ending up in the prisons of remote and isolated island nations.
New Words Learned:
acuminous – shrewd
adjucate – make a formal judgment or decision about a problem or disputed matter
anthropogenic – (chiefly of environmental pollution and pollutants) originating in human activity
aphotic – being the deep zone of an ocean or lake receiving too little light to permit photosynthesis
biome – a large naturally occurring community of flora and fauna occupying a major habitat
brachiated – moved by using the arms to swing from branch to branch
confabulations – conversations
empyreal – celestial
karst – landscape underlain by limestone that has been eroded by dissolution, producing ridges, towers, fissures, sinkholes, and other characteristic landforms
micturated – urinated
oeuvre – the works of a painter, composer, or author regarded collectively
perfidy – deceitfulness, untrustworthiness
trimaran – a yacht with three hulls in parallel
About the Author:
Brett Wiens is an award-winning author from Calgary, Canada. He writes fantasy/adventure novels with a satirical lens on the world. His writing is founded on a keen interest in geography and languages. His work takes inspiration from classical writers like Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and others.
His first novel, On Swift Wings, was begun while reading to his baby boy before his first birthday. He would read classic novels like Gulliver’s Travels and realized that the content wasn’t as relevant to today’s society as it had been when it was written. He started writing On Swift Wings as a thought experiment in how those islands might have evolved having interacted with the eponymous character of the original work, and how a modern character might interact with those new lands.
Fascinated with geography, history, politics, and economics, the book became a personal petri dish to experiment and explore curious new worlds, places, and interactions, while taking sometimes subtle, and other times more overt swipes at modern society, much as Mr. Swift did in his work.
Brett Wiens was born in Calgary, Canada in 1981. He has a bachelor’s degree in Geography and a master’s degree in Geographic Information Systems. He has won awards for his anti-racism poem, “Just One Little Rock.”
His second novel is currently in development.
