A Review for ‘Sky’s End’ by Marc J Gregson

Goodreads

I’m trying to go out of my way to read some debuts this year, so here we go.

This book is something of a rare bird, being a YA novel written by a man about a male main character. FYI, over 90% of YA novels are written by women, with women main characters. On it’s own, that makes this novel fairly special.

I had fun reading this. It reminded me of a combination of ‘Red Rising’ with Evan Winter’s ‘The Burning’ trilogy. This is a YA novel written about a boy who must go to battle school, make friends, and learn how to kill giant sky leviathans, called gorgantons. The twist is that for some students to succeed others must fail. Conrad, the protagonist, was born a noble but lost his status at a young age when his uncle cast Conrad out. Since then, Conrad’s lived a hardscrabble life with the lowest of the low, taking on dirty jobs to survive, barely keeping his head out of the noxious miasma which plagues the world.

After Conrad’s mother is killed by a leviathan, Conrad enlists in the Hunter battle school. He must learn how to pilot flying ships to hunt down those leviathans, which are essentially serpentine dragons. Humankind has been pushed to the brink of extinction by the dragons, with whole cities lost every year as the monsters multiply and spread.

Now for some specifics. The dragon-hunting Gauntlet was FANTASTIC, and the author did a great job of making every individual dragon battle distinct. Everything after the heroes got on board the ship was fantastic; I enjoyed the twist and turns of the relationship of Conrad, Pound and Sebastian, especially as it played out in the end. The author pulled a few twists which surprised even jaded me.

I thought the book could have been 20 or 30 pages shorter; the book was 400pages total, so the book needed a haircut. I felt that the inciting incident could have happened a few pages sooner, and that the Gauntlet lasted a bit too long.

I felt that the first half was weaker than the second half; the first half was 3 stars, and the second half was 5 stars, rounding out to a 4 star total. (FYI 4 and 5 star books are the top 35% of books I read in a year, with anything 2 stars and above a passing grade.)

Overall, a very strong debut. I’ve already put book 2 on hold at the library.

This is a YA novel intended for an actual YA audience. (Another FYI, about half of all YA readers are adults, not teens.) As an adult myself, I read ‘Sky’s End’ and enjoyed it as adventure fiction. However the language was simple enough to be approachable for anyone 14+. I felt the author did a good job of having a believably traumatized protagonist, and showing how difficult it can be to unpack that trauma in such a way that someone 14+ can understand it.

If you have a young mind you want to entertain, hand them this book. They’ll probably enjoy it. Or read it yourself! It’s fun.