Review: Skyward by Brandon Sanderson

​“Claim the Stars”

Genre: Sci-fi, YA

Similar to: Illuminae, Top Gun, Star Wars (ish)

Could be enjoyed by: Nerds 😉

Publication date: 6th November 2018

Brandon Sanderson has always been one of those authors that I’ve put into my mental “must read” category – and then never got round to. He’s one of my friend’s favourite authors so I’ve literally been meaning to read the Mistborn Trilogy for years – it sits there on my Kindle shelf looking at me accusingly – but for some reason I’ve always passed it by. So, I was super duper excited to be approved for his latest novel, Skyward, on NetGalley because I thought the addition on a deadline would FINALLY spur me on.

My initial reaction after reading the book is WHY DID I WAIT SO LONG??? Skyward is excellent. I mean really, really good. It made me laugh out loud, it made me cry (something I always say books never make me do, although I’ve written that three times in the past few months) and it made me feel like an idiot for not picking up Mistborn when my friend (and about thirty bloggers) told me to. Sorry guys!

Skyward is the story of Spensa who lives on the planet Detritus, which, as the name suggests, is a junk planet abandoned by it’s previous inhabitants. She was born there to a family who were crew members on a fleet of spacecraft that crash landed on Detritus following a battle with their enemies, the Krell aliens. The survivors created a subterranean world for themselves but faced aeriel attacks from the Krell. They began building spaceships to fight back and as the daughter of a previously disgraced pilot, all that Spensa wants is to sign up to fight. Those in charge, however, have other ideas.

The first thing that struck me about the novel was just the way that it was written. As someone who often takes a little while to settle in to a book (as you can tell from the number of dashes and brackets in my reviews, my internal monologue never shuts up) I read the first fifteen pages without even realising. The novel zooms along with it’s overburners on fire, excitement and adventure on every page. I loved how the answers to my questions were slowly revealed, without any boring info-dumps or obviously fortuitous events. The narrative flowed seamlessly, even through the technical details of how to fly a spaceship. I was hooked from the first sentence to the last.

I loved how all of the characters were depicted in the book, with complex personalities and hidden motivations. Each of them had good and bad traits that often led to errors of judgement or bad behaviour, especially as they were all acting in a highly pressurised environment. I really enjoyed seeing how the characters interacted with each other; arguing, vying for position and using petty insults to cover up the fact that they were all just scared. Psychologically, it was really interesting to see how they used their own quirks to figure each other out and how their diversity eventually became a strength *suppresses urge to spout boring group development theory*.

Unusually for a sci-fi novel (especially one written by a man) the book is pretty female centric and I loved that the female representation was just…there. There was no political point, no-one in the story told Spensa she couldn’t be a pilot because she was a girl – indeed, the head of the defensive federation is a woman and the pilots seemed to be a 50/50 mix of men and women. The book could do easily have gone down the Handmaid’s Tale route, forcing women to keep popping out babies in order to ensure the survival of a small population against a vast number of enemies but Sanderson clearly chose to make Spensa his rebellious MC for reasons other than her gender. I personally found this a refreshing change (and I say that as a feminist – I just think that trope has been done too many times).

I also really, really loved the fact that there was no bloody romance taking up space in the life of a girl who simply wanted to kill space aliens and avenge the death of her father. It was soooo great not to have to deal with cringey teenage attempts at flirting, although I suspect there might be some of that coming in the next instalment *sigh*. 

I loved how the ending to the novel was so difficult to guess and although I had some idea, it was still a surprise. I’ll try not to give too much away but a certain character reminded me very much of AIDAN from Illuminae so I was kept in my toes wondering if he was a reliable narrator or not – and what bearing that would have on the rest of the story. 

Overall, I loved Skyward from the first sentence to the last. Some parts should have been boring (protracted battle flights filled with technical detail, endless comments about mushrooms) yet somehow Sanderson absolutely chuffing nailed it. 

Rating: 🌟Five “no YOU’RE crying at a talking plane” out of five.🌟

A fearless main character, a seamless narrative and an unexpected ending made Skyward a fantastic read from start to finish.

Please note that I read this book for free via Netgalley in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks Netgalley!