Author: Lucy Saxon
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: warty
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
Errata:
P101 - 101 are three instances of the case being wrong: "Dalivia have control of Kasem" should be 'has control' and "if the Angliyan government don't..." that last work should be 'doesn’t'. "The rest of Tellus have…" that last work should be 'has' - this kind of error appears several times.
P103 "Everything was up in arms" should be "Everything was up in the air" maybe?
P140: Saxon makes the "bicep" mistake (it's biceps).
I don't get the title for this novel. The story has nothing whatsoever to do with taking back any skies! Lucy Saxon, it turns out, is not only a really cool character from Doctor Who (and what could be a sweeter name for a character than that?!), she's also a real life woman who wrote this novel. By all accounts, she did it when she was sixteen, which is quite a remarkable achievement. That said, the fact that this was written by a sixteen-year-old shows a little too uncomfortably. The writing isn’t bad. In fact in general, it’s technically rather good, but the amateur plotting highlights her inexperience, and it also proves that Big Publishing™ is a guarantor neither of big success, nor of big quality.
This novel was too long, and it needed an editor who wasn't afraid to risk upsetting a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old by pointing out that it needs some serious tightening. This is ironic, because this is a steam-punk novel which begins with its main character quite literally learning the ropes, and having to tighten knots and bolts on the sky-ship. This character is 14 year old Catherine Hunter, who lives a privileged life on a world named Tellus, where familiar but rather twistedly-named nations (Adena, Angliya, Dalivia, Erova, Kasem, Mericus, Ropastal, Sibarene) are at war with one another.
Catherine doesn't want to lead a life of "privilege" shackled to an obnoxious suitor in an arranged marriage and quickly slips away from her father during a trip to discuss her unwanted upcoming nuptials. She stows away on a fine-looking merchant sky-ship named Stormdancer, which appears to be built like a sail-ship but it flies. This crew also does a little smuggling on the side - or more accurately in the false bottom. Cat (as she now renames herself) is improbably quickly accepted onto the crew - all of whom think she's a boy now that her hair is cut short and she's dressed in old, dirty pants, and a baggy shirt.
And that's one big problem with this novel: everything was far too too easy: from Cat's initial escape from her father, to her finding the perfect sky-ship, to being accepted onto the ship, to learning about the government's plot, to bringing down this same government. There were no hiccups, no problems, no set-backs, no tension. If this novel had been written for pre-teens, then this would have still been a problem in my book, but much less of one. Unfortunately, Cat is in the YA age range, and this is not good enough, although given the low standards of all-too-many readers, it might take off. I'm guessing that’s what the publisher is gambling on. And who knows, as the author matures and grows in experience (and assuming she can find an editor who is willing to put quality ahead of a writer's feelings), maybe future volumes in this series will be significantly better. That's something for which we can hold out a hope.
Another problem was that there's a bit too much fluttering of heart at sight of bare chest and at slim strip of bare flesh above waistband when the Mary Sue trope male interest shows up. I could have done without that. It’s possible to depict a character as liking another, or as experiencing a growing attraction to another character without hammering me over the head with it every few pages, but YA authors don't seem to have grasped that, except in a few rare and precious cases.
So anyway, Cat and Fox (cute, yeah?) are thrust inevitably exactly where we expect them to go: into tired and clichéd YA romance situations, such as when she sees him "accidentally" with his shirt off, and when she and he have to hide in a cramped closet together. Note that this isn’t a problem of a sixteen-year-old's writing. All-too-many YA authors, who are older and more experienced, and who really should know a lot better, write these same appallingly drab trope scenes. I live in hopes of finding writers who can tell a story about a strong female main character without her necessarily needing to have a guy (or a girl for that matter) in tow, or at the very least, spin the yarn with some inventive and new flirtatious situations in which the couple may find themselves. Otherwise tale becomes stale, and that's the end of it for me.
At one point, Cat comes off as repulsively arrogant. Fox has a problem with another guy, and she determines that it must either be that guy's personality or it must be the way he looked at Cat! Seriously? That struck a really sour note with me. This is not the Cat we were promised in the beginning of this novel. What we have here is bait-and-switch. We were promised a strong female, but what we were given is actually a wussy, fluttering Harlequin romance chick!
The problem is that this behavior kicks against everything Cat has been thinking prior to this point, and there's nothing worse than a main character who obsesses over herself. As if that were not bad enough, on the very next page we have Cat spontaneously blurting out that she wouldn’t marry the guy. That really started turning me off this novel - her slavering, simpering addiction to the secretive Fox, who childishly treated her like dirt when he discovered that she was a girl, and who calls her 'girlie' (seriously? Way to demean and belittle your partner), and about whom she knows quite literally nothing. I lost all respect for Cat at this point.
As for Fox, I never did like him. He's so trope-ish as to be a caricature. As I mentioned, he's also a Mary Sue in the traditional sense, in that he could never do a thing wrong: he could get them out of any situation and he could fix or solve any problem. Unfortunately he couldn't fix his own juvenile attitude towards Cat when he adopted a surly and argumentative attitude towards her after he discovered Cat's true gender. This was entirely unrealistic and ham-fisted as he was shown being alternately antagonistic and then conciliatory towards her.
Cat further goes down the toilet when she and Fox, snooping around a government institution, discover something horrid, and she turns into a spineless coat-clinger. This is the same girl we were introduced to, 200 pages before, who was feisty, determined, self-motivated, and all but fearless. What a 180 we’ve done! Do boys in this world emit some sort of brain-deadening pheromone which girls absorb through their skin, and which then destroys their brain cells? At this point, the once feisty and independent Cat refuses to go to sleep unless Fox is next to her, holding her hand. This is truly pathetic! Note to YA authors: do not suck the spine out of your main female character - no matter what! - and especially not when you've set her up so well, only to cheat us out of the very character you promised you'd deliver.
But worse than all this, the plot ceases to make sense at this point. It’s hard to explain without giving away more spoilers than even I'm known for, but let me try. There is an element of child labor and child abuse in this novel, and there's also an element of steam-punk robotics. The child abuse consists of children being forcibly appropriated from their family at the age of thirteen, in order to fight in a never-ending war. It turns out that the children are actually more connected with the robotics, but given how advanced the robotics are in this world, this plot point makes absolutely zero sense. It was here that I lost interest in this novel and lightly skimmed the rest of it (about a quarter or a third of it).
In an interview, the author is reported as saying, "I find the whole concept of a strong female character to be incredibly frustrating in that it implies it’s an unusual thing for women to be strong", but if this is what she actually said, then she's simply not getting it. Those of us who demand strong female characters aren't saying that women cannot be strong, or that such people are unusual or unexpected. What we’re saying is that YA writers (all-too-many of whom are female ironically enough) are giving us weak, spineless, dependent female characters - characters who are effectively slaved to guys (yes, plural! Where do you think the sad and tired trope love-triangle came from?!). This is where they're weak - in the stories, not in real life.
The female characters we get in the stories are air-headed appendages, who are ineffectual and ultimately uninteresting. They simply do not get it done. That's the problem, and writers like Saxon are contributing to it with characters like this. Yes, there's a host of amazing, wonderful, fascinating, intriguing, amusing, enthralling, irresistible and kick-ass women in the real world, so the real issue here is: why don’t we see far more of them in novels, especially in novels written by female authors, and especially in novels which are read by young women who are being done a major disservice by these authors, because they're not being given the female leads they deserve, need, and have earned.
I will grant Saxon the twist at the end. That was not what I expected, but even it is a trope, given that this is purportedly the first in a series, perhaps a hexalogy. This ending also unfortunately makes a liar out of Cat, but worse than that, it makes no sense. Maybe I missed something critical in my skimming which would adequately explain this, but given what I have read, I honestly have no faith that there actually is such an explanation to be had. From what I understand, the series will not necessarily follow the same characters in future volumes, but it will be set in the same world, so maybe this will make future volumes worth the reading. As it is, I cannot see myself pursuing this series. It just doesn’t have what it takes to be great. I’d recommend to Saxon that she read the Jim Butcher Codex Alera series to learn how to create a strong female character, particularly in the form of Kitai, who's my all time favorite.
On the positive side, Saxon definitely looks like she does have something to contribute as she matures, and hopefully writes material outside of this canon. Maybe then, I'll come back to her and try again, but this novel I cannot recommend unless your standards are really low and you're desperate for any kind of adventure reading material! It seems to me that this is one of those novels where a publisher is less interested in delivering a quality read, than it is in getting its hooks into a writer whom it felt it could milk for a few volumes, and I despise that attitude vehemently. Maybe they felt they saw a young Jo Rowling here, and maybe in time, that's what Saxon can become, but she's not there yet.
