A provocative premise in need of further thought and polish.
Centuries after an environmental catastrophe, a young archivist is shocked to discover that she and the others in her tightly regimented underground community aren’t the only humans left on the planet.
To Rook, ArHK, or Archives of Human Knowledge, has always been the whole world—until the day that words appear on her computer screen that she didn’t type: “My name is Gage. Who are u?” This experience is just as thrilling to Gage, who, as the newest member of a team exploring the ruins of Washington, D.C., in search of a half-remembered, long-lost ancestral Ship of Knowledge, discovers a live screen deep in a subbasement after falling down an elevator shaft. In alternating chapters Kilbourne maps out two uncomplicated societies—one of hunter-gatherer surface dwellers seeking out artifacts from the long-ago Storm Ages, the other designed to be a self-sustaining refuge deliberately cut off from the Outside centuries ago by its autocratic, hereditary Governors. Unfortunately, the author focuses primarily on developing her scenario over attention to the plotlines—to the detriment of twists, suspense, or even, at times, coherence, particularly toward the end where they collapse into a confusing mess of coincidences and disconnected incidents, finishing on a weak cliffhanger that reads more like a simple lack of resolution. The cast members, apparently all White, include one supporting character who may be on the spectrum.
A provocative premise in need of further thought and polish. (Post-apocalyptic fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4597-4887-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dundurn
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
Sanderson (Legion, 2018, etc.) plainly had a ball with this nonstop, highflying opener, and readers will too.
Eager to prove herself, the daughter of a flier disgraced for cowardice hurls herself into fighter pilot training to join a losing war against aliens.
Plainly modeled as a cross between Katniss Everdeen and Conan the Barbarian (“I bathed in fires of destruction and reveled in the screams of the defeated. I didn’t get afraid”), Spensa “Spin” Nightshade leaves her previous occupation—spearing rats in the caverns of the colony planet Detritus for her widowed mother’s food stand—to wangle a coveted spot in the Defiant Defense Force’s flight school. Opportunities to exercise wild recklessness and growing skill begin at once, as the class is soon in the air, battling the mysterious Krell raiders who have driven people underground. Spensa, who is assumed white, interacts with reasonably diverse human classmates with varying ethnic markers. M-Bot, a damaged AI of unknown origin, develops into a comical sidekick: “Hello!...You have nearly died, and so I will say something to distract you from the serious, mind-numbing implications of your own mortality! I hate your shoes.” Meanwhile, hints that all is not as it seems, either with the official story about her father or the whole Krell war in general, lead to startling revelations and stakes-raising implications by the end. Stay tuned. Maps and illustrations not seen.
Sanderson (Legion, 2018, etc.) plainly had a ball with this nonstop, highflying opener, and readers will too. (Science fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-55577-0
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
More terrific combat scenes, but a bit too heavy on character development to fly at speed.
The third episode in the Skyward series sees red-hot space pilot Spensa Nightshade coming into her full powers as she battles both pirates and space monsters in a strange interdimensional nowhere.
Leaving her ongoing feud with evil galactic overlords on temporary hold back in the somewhere, Spensa passes through a portal to a realm where time and memories tend to slip away, bits of landscape randomly snipped from reality float like islands around a distant sunburst—and teeming hordes of disembodied, malevolent entities called delvers are relentlessly hunting her down. Fun as all the space-opera elements are, though, they continue a trend from the preceding volume in deadening the efforts of Spensa and sidekicks old and new to establish personal identities or backstories, wrestle with inner demons, or, in the case of the AI M-Bot, practice insults and deal with newly discovered emotions. A few wild aerial dogfights and larger battles later, however, Spensa has come into her cytonic superpowers, found out some crucial things about the delvers, and made her way back to the somewhere. Now for those overlords….McSweeney contributes a map, lovingly detailed sets of spaceship plans, and galleries of the multispecies cast members. Wild diversity of intergalactic body types notwithstanding, human members seem uniformly White.
More terrific combat scenes, but a bit too heavy on character development to fly at speed. (Science fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-399-55585-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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