Mini Review: Skyward by Brandon Sanderson

This one turned out to be a pretty special read for me this past week… My mind was focused on the Kincade fire here in Sonoma County and I didn’t get a lot of time to read. And when I did sit down I had a hard time getting into anything I started. At one point, I read almost a dozen first chapters in one night, until I finally opened up Skyward.

It was everything I needed to distract me for a time from the news that was streaming in from the north part of our county. It’s a simple underdog story about a girl who is branded a coward and traitor because her father turned his fighter on his own wing.

Spensa sees it as her mission to right those wrongs. She doesn’t believe the official story and wants to prove it incorrect and also become a pilot in her own right to join the fight against the Krell, the alien race that keeps humans trapped inside the planet. She’s a great character who does everything in her power to complete flight school. When the whole military complex is against her including the director, she has few allies she can depend on. Spensa has a her teacher who is a former friend of her father’s… and she has M-Bot, the AI on a ship she finds while in a cavern on the surface.

When I said “simple” before, I did not mean that the writing was simple, but that the story is pretty straight forward. There’s only one POV for the vast majority of the book, and the timeline of the plot is easy to follow. I didn’t have to do any hard thinking to get into this one at all. And the story was filled with twists that kept me locked in.

Fun and uplifting, this is a book that let me escape.