Book Review: Skyward by Brandon Sanderson

Skyward was a wild ride, a coming of age story for a stubborn, determined and special girl, and an imaginative science fiction endeavour. I do really love a happy ending. I also love Sanderson's ability to write great, engaging characters, and the fact that so many of his books feature amazing female protagonists.

Cover: Skyward by Brandon Sanderson

Spensa “Spin” Nightshade wants nothing more than to be a pilot like her father, the legendary Zeen “Chaser” Nightshade. But ever since the Battle of Alta, in which her father allegedly turned coward and fled in the heat of battle, she and her whole family have been treated like pariahs. Achieving her dreams and redeeming her father’s legacy seems like a far cry when faced against the might of their entire civilization, but Spensa wouldn’t be Spensa if she didn’t at least try.

Where do I start? This book made me laugh, made me want to cry, and then took me right into triumphant euphoria. I do really love a happy ending. I also love Sanderson’s ability to write great, engaging characters, and the fact that so many of his books feature amazing female protagonists.

I’ll simply have to deal with it, I told myself. The warrior cannot choose her bed; she must bless the stars if she can choose her battlefield. A quote from Junmi’s The Conquest of Space. I loved Gran-Gran’s stories about Junmi almost as much as I did the old Viking stories, even if they didn’t have quite as many decapitations.

Spensa’s character development isn’t a two-step process: there is no line connecting from misery to realization, and leading to victory. When she is told that the top brass at the airforce are determined to keep her out of flight school regardless of her marks on the entrance test, she runs away, heartbroken.

It then occurs to her that perhaps the higher-ups being so hard on her is the test – she has to prove she is Defiant, like the rest of her people, and not a coward, unlike her father.

Unfortunately for Spensa, when she makes it to the test, her initial fears were proven right – they don’t want her to take the test – in fact, they give her a test that doesn’t even have anything to do with flight school.

Fortunately for Spin, her father’s old wingmate puts her in his class. But making it to flight school is hardly triumphant, as she finds out soon enough. Admiral Judy “Ironsides” Ivans forbids her the same facilities as her fellow students – access to the mess hall, the bunks, the physical training. So obviously Spensa decides to camp out in a cave with an ancient starfighter and her new friend, a kind of slug she names Doomslug the Destroyer.

“Those rats,” I said, “shall soon know the wrath of my hunger, dispensed through tiny coils of justice.” I smiled, then realized I was talking to a weird cave slug, which was a new low even for me.

From the start, Spensa tends towards the grandiose. Too many viking books and not enough friends, I’d say. She talks a tall game, threatening her fellow students and literally trying to appear bigger than she is. She also tends to hiss a lot in response when she’s angry, so I’m gonna go ahead and say she has domestic cat genes somewhere in her bloodline.

She’s also unsure of how to respond to her fellow flightmates, after a lifetime of being treated as an outcast. Since no one else initially knows who her father is, she starts to build a decent rapport with them, becoming good friends with Quirk, earning Hurl’s respect, starting an academic rivalry with Amphis, and a less academic rivalry with their Flightleader Jorgen, whom she promptly dubs Jerkface, and with whom she has tonnes of chemistry.

The flight comes together in an organic fashion, with initial misunderstandings and grudges dissolving away in the face of the deaths of their fellow flight members during missions that no inexperienced cadets should have been in any way. Clearly, the high command is desperate and running out of pilots faster than they’re running out of enemies.

I rather naively expected that everyone in her Flight would turn out to be what they appeared to be. That Jorgen would continue to represent everything she hated and was deprived of – wealth, privilege, comfort, and tonnes of social influence. At the same time, there’s only so many times a girl can call a guy’s face “too-handsome” without arousing suspicion.

I blushed, remembering my line of thought. Ashes mixing with dust and howls on the wind? That sort of thing—once so exciting to me—now seemed…less the words of a hero, and more the words of someone trying to sound heroic. My father had never talked like that.

The theme of cowardice overwhelms the storyline and character development like strong cologne. Spin’s entire life has been defined by her father’s final moments, and at the beginning of the book, everything about her personality is designed to prove she’s no coward. But as the story progresses, she finds herself questioning her definition of cowardice – even more so after her flightmate dies after being shot down because she refused to eject from the plane. Because the ships they fly are rarer than the availability of pilots, the toxic aggression that permeates the entire flight corps has evolved into viewing ejection as an act of cowardice, insisting instead that a pilot must do everything in their power to save the ship from being utterly destroyed.

This gets even more complicated with the revelation of “the defect” – a mental power that allows some pilots to fly faster and better, anticipating the movements of their enemy. It is suspected that it is this very power that caused Spin’s father to act out of character at that fateful battle, and is also why Admiral Ironsides is determined to kick Spin out of training. Once she begins to see the same visions as her father did and hear the same voices, Spin too comes to the conclusion that it is safer for everyone if she stays grounded.

So the climax of Spin’s character development comes when she decides to face the fear, the defect, the possibility of failing.

Skyward was a wild ride, a coming of age story for a stubborn, determined and special girl, and an imaginative science fiction endeavour. Hopefully, we have more starflights in the sequel, more space battles, and maybe even some romance.

First published on Feminist Quill (March 15, 2020)