Skyward by Brandon Sanderson (2018)
Perfectly balanced: beautifully layered
Book cover blurb
Spensa’s world has been under attack for hundreds of years. An alien race called the Krell leads onslaught after onslaught from the sky in a never-ending campaign to destroy humankind. Humanity’s only defence is to take to their ships and fight the enemy in the skies. Piolets have become heroes of what’s left of the human race.
Spensa has always dreamt of being one of them; of soaring above Earth and proving her bravery. But her fate is intertwined with her father’s - a pilot who was killed years ago when he abruptly deserted his team, placing Spensa’s chances of attending flight school somewhere between slim and none.
No one will let Spensa forget what her father did, but she is still determined to fly. And the Krell just made that a possibility. They’ve doubled their fleet, making Spensa’s world twice as dangerous…but their desperation to survive might just take her skyward…
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My Review
Ok, I can admit it, this is a really good book. And to think I wasn't going to read it.
After reading, or trying and failing to read, Elantris, I decided Sanderson was not for me. In all honesty, I was completely bored when reading it and was put off reading anything else by him. So, thanks to suggestions that I shouldn't dismiss Skyward, I paid my money and took my chances.
This book has great progression with just the right amount of action balanced with character development. It's a simplistic read, featuring a mostly young cast, not my favourite, but it still very much engaged me. Even the romance element involving the main character was handled really well and developed over a believable time frame, as in virtually the entire book.
The drive behind the story is the main character, Spin's struggle to prove herself, and her refusal to accept that her father was a coward in battle. And how her world falls apart when she discovers the truth about what really happened.
There is a lot going on in this book, more than I realised while reading. It wasn't until I started talking to my wife about it and explaining aspects of the story that I started to realise all the different layers involved.
There is also a great deal of emotion involved, for me as a reader, that built as I got further into the book. I would imagine if you picked out the emotional aspects of this book and read them on their own they would seem like nothing, but read the entire book and it all builds up so much, it really is effective. Probably the entire last third of the book was read through the distortion of building tears. Or maybe I'm just a natural softy.
This book isn't a life changer by any means, but it most certainly is a fantastic read.
My copy of this novel
Gollancz hardback edition.
Published in 2018
513 pages
ISBN 9781473217850