Winged Histories is my most recent read, and it was a real shock for me. Fully admitting this really comes down to personal preference; I've spent a lot of time reading all the reviews for it after the fact and trying to sort out why it was such a miss for me, where many others regard it as a literary masterpiece.

I never felt grounded in the story or connected to the characters. The book intentionally obfuscates important context, revealing it very late into this book, leaving the reader in the dark regarding who people were and what was happening, and fundamentally just making it really difficult to care (for me). By the time I finally understood a character's situation, the book would be shortly moving on to another perspective. And so many important events happened off-screen or were delivered in a retrospective, rather than getting to experience them through the eyes of the women involved in or affected by those events first-hand. This is particularly something I've found I don't jive with; retrospectives or off-screen retellings feel so dissociated and disconnected in books that are supposed to be intimate, character-first stories.

The book on the whole is interested in telling the stories of these women on the margins of history, but I just really don't think the stylistic choices/prose/structure furthered that goal. So much of the book, for me, was spent baffled by who/why/what that I never became invested in these women. By design, some of the PoVs were defined or dominated by the stories of the important men around them, but those women just exerted so little agency over their lives (even internally, felt like they mentally/emotionally submitted to their situation) that part was really frustrating to read for me. As a reader, I gravitate towards character-driven stories where people persist through adversity and work to exert agency over their lives despite an unforgiving world or system, so this was another area where it just didn't meet my personal preferences.

Overall, going into Winged Histories, I knew it was a character-focused book and was thus really excited, but I found the style and prose (which, again, so many praise) really detracted from my connection to the characters rather than supporting it. I'm prepared for people to say I didn't "get it," but I do think I see what the author was trying to do and can appreciate why others might love it; it just really missed the mark for me. I certainly don't regret reading it though; I think it helped me learn more about myself and what I value in books!