Skyward

4 to 4.5 stars. Sanderson does it again and reinforces my impression of him as one of the most consistently solid writers around. I started off this book a little nervous honestly and kinda wasn't completely feeling the book until about 25-30% in. I ended off very much satisfied and probably going to pick up the next one.

I guess relative to Sanderson's other works, Skyward might be considered a YA in that it has teenage protagonists and has a bit more action and less political maneuvering as in his adult fantasy novels. But as you might expect, there are none of the tired old YA tropes here. I spent a lot of the book trying to predict what was going to happen and I thought I had the book in several instances, but Sanderson somehow finds a way to subvert my expectations and give the plot a twist I didn't see coming. The only one development I guessed correctly was thinking that Spensa was going to eventually eject in some dire situation, have her plane wrecked, and then eventually fly in on M-Bot to save the day in some epic final battle, but there were at least ten more tropes that I had guessed but didn't happen.

Our main protagonist Spensa had a really good character arc. She was almost insufferable at the beginning with her blustering naivete, even though I suppose she had somewhat good reason. She did eventually develop as a character after her experiences in the book and grew pretty tolerable by the end. My favourite character is probably Cobb, but only after M-Bot and Doomslug. (I also wonder if M-Bot is a call to Martha Wells's Murderbot, or if it was just a huge coincidence?) I also liked that Ironsides was morally gray at best.

The world was pretty realistic overall. It is 100% believable that humankind would find a way to continually stratify their society into the more and less privileged (and geographically so in this one) no matter how much of a pickle they end up in, and that the more privileged ones would always find a way to make situations balance in their favour. What I found the most bizarre about this world is their obsession with cowardice. Even from the very beginning, I thought it odd that they labeled Spensa's father a “coward”. Sure, you could conceivably label a deserter as a coward, but it was just so odd that everyone was so hung up about that, and showed the same treatment to Spensa. I guess it might be because the society was such a militaristic one, but I just couldn't get past it. And to for some instructors/pilots to view the act of ejecting oneself from a plane when it's beyond salvaging as cowardice?! That's just wild to me.

Thoughts on the ending: Can we say deus ex M-Bot?! There were some tropey parts about the ending but it was written so satisfactorily that overall I'm not even mad. I kept imagining the ending of the movie Independence Day, where the small lone ship flies into the mothership to prevent it from destroying Earth. It kinda felt like that was going to happen when Spensa was about to dive into the lifebuster but I guess not. I liked the answers we got and while it still raised more questions so that the rest of the series can go on, I didn't feel like we were just left on one big cliffhanger, or like this was just one half of a full book. I'm glad it didn't happen that the Krell were the original inhabitants of Detritus and that the humans were the invaders. I've just recently read a book where that happened and I would not have been pleased if that had been repeated here. I'm glad also that we did find out what happened to Spensa's father, but also that we have more to explore re: Spensa's “defect”. I'm guessing it's some kind of weird telepathic connection but I doubt that it stops at the Krell, it's probably much bigger than that.