Skyward

At the beginning, readers are drawn into an exciting world where humans battle to save their desolate planet from an alien race. But in typical Brandon Sanderson fashion, good and evil are not clear-cut, and the conflict soon grows far more complex. 

As the series progresses, the main character, Spensa, discovers that the battle for her planet is not as straightforward as she had once thought, and that the aliens she had fought were neither uniform nor uniformly evil. When she infiltrates an alien homeland in Book 2, Spensa is forced to question her original assumptions about who deserves to… show more.

Brandon Sanderson is one of the most prolific writers working today. He’s also my single biggest source of inspiration as an author. He’s written everything from massive, tome-sized fantasy epics for adults to middle grade action-adventure.

With Skyward, a YA space opera set in the far future on an alien planet, Sanderson is having a total blast. You truly cannot turn the pages fast enough. Our heroine, Spensa, wants nothing more than to be a pilot, like her disgraced father (who was branded a coward after inexplicably turning on his flight mates). You see, for Spensa, getting enrolled into… show more.

If you’re at all familiar with Brandon Sanderson, you may worry that diving into this YA work of his will require a significant amount of mental fortitude to follow. But unlike his high fantasy novels, Sanderson really dials it back in Skyward, making it an easy read with such fantastic dialogue that I laughed aloud repeatedly. Spensa is a curious, resilient girl, hellbent on redeeming her father’s legacy. Of the many AI’s that I’ve come to love in my sci-fi stories, MBOT is my all-time favorite and reason alone to read this book.