Skyward Book Review

Major Spoilers are included in this book review. Please read with caution.

On August 17, 2020, I started reading Skyward—a YA science fiction novel—by Brandon Sanderson and finished on August 22, 2020. First off, I had such a great time with Sanderson’s latest series. Reading Skyward over the past five days reminded me of how I felt about Mistborn: The Final Empire—my first Brandon Sanderson fantasy novel—when I read it back in 2018. Coincidentally, Skyward was published in 2018.

Synopsis: A young woman named Spensa dreams of being a pilot and flying like her father did before, but there are forces working against Spensa—obstacles she has to overcome just to get a shot at her impossible dream. However, Spensa will do whatever it takes to fly and claim the stars.

If you read that synopsis and thought it was similar to an anime/manga plotline, you wouldn’t be wrong. I have stated many times in previous book reviews—more in casual conversation—that Sanderson writes his stories similar to anime and manga to the point that my writing expectations are starting to get too high.

Also similar to Mistborn, Skyward had great joy, excitement, and full of heart blended into the narrative. The main protagonist Spensa reminded me a lot of Vin and Lift—from Mistborn and Edgedancer respectively—mixed together. Having read so much Sanderson, of course I would find his awesome characters resembling each other.

Spensa—Call Sign: Spin—is a fun, relatable, and entertaining female protagonist. Her goals during the story—becoming a pilot and restoring her father’s reputation—are worth investing in and rooting for. She represents what humanity should be like rather than what it is. Despite the impossible odds, Spensa pushes onward and keeps believing that she can become a pilot.

Spensa is also an inspirational source for all the supporting characters—including a character who ended up being nicknamed Jerkface—and through her first-person POV, the reader is able to spot the depth behind all the characters’ motives for being pilots and the expectations placed on them through the government’s willingness to sacrifice their own inexperienced pilots for the greater good. The key to the relatability in this beautiful novel is “relatable emotions” not “relatable situations”, which is how you sympathize with Spensa’s character growth and her views on Flight School and Atla’s government.

Of course, I must talk about Brandon Sanderson’s world-building. A Sanderson Book Review isn’t complete without that tidbit. He introduces the world and how everything works in Atla gradually, without doing a massive info-dump while also maintaining the mystery of how Spensa’s society came into existence and their ongoing war with an alien species known as the Krell. Similar to how Sanderson creates his hard-magic system, he created a system for how ships combat each other and the best strategies to utilize during this combat.

I also enjoyed how violence is depicted in this novel. While there was hardly anything graphic or gore, the consequences following the violence are a lot heavily felt throughout the story. I would have to pause whenever tragedy struck and prepare myself for Spensa’s reactions / grievances that would follow after in the next chapter. Honestly, the science-fiction plot was steady, but the characters are the reason why I stick around.

I would definitely recommend anything Brandon Sanderson wrote, but Skyward is truly an exceptional read on par with his other famous novel Mistborn: The Final Empire. In my book reviews regarding The Reckoners series, I mentioned how Brandon Sanderson hadn’t done his best work with a first-person POV, but he clearly improved in that area when writing Skyward. I’m excited to see what he has in store next with this story. I plan to read the sequel—Starsight—next. Thanks for reading this book review, everyone! Let’s keep it reading—and claim the stars!