Skyward

By Brandon Sanderson,

Book cover of Skyward

Book description

Spensa's world has been under attack for hundreds of years. An alien race called the Krell leads onslaught after onslaught from the sky in a never-ending campaign to destroy humankind. Humanity's only defense is to take to their ships and fight the enemy in the skies. Pilots have become theā€¦

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Why read it?

4 authors picked Skyward as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book is a Top Gun/Sci-Fi mash-up, and I absolutely love it. Spensa is the flawed female main character, and I adore how she spouts ancient warrior battle cries like itā€™s going out of style, and everyone else doesnā€™t quite know what to make of her. Spensa doesnā€™t think before speaking or acting and is so impulsive even she sees it and canā€™t do anything about it.

I love Brandon Sandersonā€™s books. He world-builds like crazy and gives his characters such a believable life that I fell into this one and had a hard time coming up for air.ā€¦

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 toā€¦

Brandon Sanderson is one of the most prolific writers working today. Heā€™s also my single biggest source of inspiration as an author. Heā€™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 intoā€¦

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Book cover of Who Gave Sleep and Who Has Taken It Away?

Who Gave Sleep and Who Has Taken It Away? by Carole McDonnell,

In the Malku universe, fae, merfolk, and humans live together in varying degrees of harmony. Over the millenia, through the use of fae magic, these humanoid groups have inter-married thus creating the faekind (humans with fae ancestry) and webbies (humans with merfolk ancestry.) The story takes place in the landā€¦

If youā€™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 fatherā€™s legacy. Of the many AIā€™s that Iā€™ve come to love in my sci-fi stories, MBOT is my all-time favorite and reason alone to read this book.

From L. Blaise's list on young adult soft science-fiction.

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Book cover of Who Gave Sleep and Who Has Taken It Away?

Who Gave Sleep and Who Has Taken It Away? by Carole McDonnell,

In the Malku universe, fae, merfolk, and humans live together in varying degrees of harmony. Over the millenia, through the use of fae magic, these humanoid groups have inter-married thus creating the faekind (humans with fae ancestry) and webbies (humans with merfolk ancestry.) The story takes place in the landā€¦

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