Reviewed by Jess
TITLE: Spread Your Wings
AUTHOR: Edie Montreux
PUBLISHER: MLR Press
LENGTH: 111 pages
RELEASE DATE: November 29, 2018
BLURB:
On the way to the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, Sammy gives Mustafa a chance to escape the Bosnian war.
“Spread Your Wings” is the tale of Sammy Connelly’s first job as a CNN Correspondent in Sarajevo in February 1992. The job and rising tensions in Sarajevo do little to calm Sammy’s nerves before the biggest concert of his lifetime: The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert. One of the hotel clerks, Mustafa, helps Sammy with a health scare and distracts him from the war. When Mustafa ends up in the hospital as a casualty of war, Sammy knows he’s got to get him to London, and home to Atlanta, if Mustafa will go. Along the way, they experience the largest celebrity tribute concert of our time and find “Somebody to Love.”
REVIEW:
There’s a lot going on in this short book. Readers are thrust from political uprising into one of the biggest gay cultural moments of the last 25 years in a matter of pages, all while two men find their footing with one another and fall in love. It’s a lot to pack into one novella, and while it falters here and there, it’s a generally sweet and fast-paced love story with an intense atmosphere.
Rather than being a sweeping epic, this is a historical romance that takes place in a very specific snapshot of time—the start of the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina along with the 1992 Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness in London. Sammy, a young American CNN reporter, is tasked with reporting the growing unrest in Sarajevo along with two colleagues. At their hotel, Sammy meets Mustafa, a Bosnian man whose sexuality and ethnicity make him a target to locals. The two men feel an instant attraction that overcomes religious and language boundaries, but they have no idea war is about to break out, putting them both in danger.
And this is only half of the story! The other part of Sammy’s journey entails his love for the band Queen, especially Freddie Mercury, and how he remains devastated that he could never see Freddie sing live. He has the opportunity to see the epic 1992 Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in London, and he plans to take Mustafa with him—if they can safely get out of Sarajevo first.
The stakes feel ridiculously low, especially amidst literal gunfire and snipers on rooftops, but in the end, this is a story about normal people who want to find normal joys in life, even during chaos. The Bosnian War is well-researched and the tension in Sarajevo is felt throughout the story. It’s not a setting I’ve read about before, and I appreciate that the author did their research, even for a short romance.
This is an odd, weirdly-paced story, and I’m sure you’ll never read a romance with this combination of events ever again. But the characters are likable, they have chemistry, and the background history is compelling enough to keep you pretty satisfied.
RATING: 
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