SKYWARD

Top Gun in space

Renowned for his fantasy series, Brandon Sanderson turns to science fiction with Skyward, a novel whose heroine suggests a Young Adult demographic, though the prose is strong enough to satisfy adult readers. Spensa is the aforementioned star of the tale, a hot-tempered, sharp-tongued teen with fire in her belly cut from a cloth familiar to any Hunger Games fan. Stranded on a planet called Detritus, the last remnants of mankind face constant attack from the alien Krell, but no one knows who the enemy is or why they won’t stop fighting. Spensa lives with the shame that her fighter-pilot father was shot down as a deserter, and is determined to prove her worth by enrolling in flight school and joining the battle.

Sanderson is very good at action. Every time Spensa and her classmates take to the skies to face the Krell, the book goes into Top Gun mode, with thrilling accounts of aerial combat. Of course, there’s more to the unhappy fate of Spensa’s father than official accounts reveal, and that’s one of the most compelling threads in the plot. Sanderson doesn’t flinch from some of the realities of war and not all of the cast survive encounters with the aliens, although the supporting characters aren’t drawn with enough depth to make their losses feel harrowing in the way Suzanne Collins does in The Hunger Games.

Spensa has a habit of shooting her mouth off and early on can be abrasive and childish, but that’s the start of her emotional journey, not its culmination. There’s a hint of romance between Spensa and her flight leader, but that element of the story is underweight and likely something to be developed further as this series continues to unfold. And some characters feel like they exist purely to facilitate the plot, most particularly Spensa’s engineer pal Rodge. But the breathless rush of the dogfights is what lingers longest in the mind. David West

Skyward has roots in “boy and his dragon” books Sanderson loved as a young man, like Anne McCaffrey’s The White Dragon.

Sanderson is very good at action