A 'Sky in the Deep' Review

This weekend in my local Barnes and Nobles store I found myself drawn to the beautiful cover of the book Sky in the Deep by Adrienne Young. Now, I don’t ever buy books just for their covers so I proceeded to open the book and read the jacket cover. This cover featured a blurb about the story, promising war, romance, and a kickass female protagonist. I finished the book a few hours ago and I’m disappointed to say it didn’t quite live up to my expectations.

The first few chapters of the book were wonderful and fast moving. The main character, Eelyn, is in the middle of a fast-paced action scene when she sees her dead brother. She goes after him and this leads into the rest of the book. Once she is captured by her brother, now part of the rival clan, the Riki’s, the pace of the story starts to drastically slow. Granted, I still finished it in one day. I found it easy to put down and go about my life, doing errands and such. While the author does a good job of describing what's going on and the surroundings, there is a clear lacking in suspense building. Everything is this book is straightforward and to the point. There wasn't any foreshadowing or plot twists, to my dismay.

The main character and her thoughts are portrayed in a good way, making it easy to grow to like the protagonist. Eelyn, as a character, grows and develops in sync with the events in the book; her character arc is predictable but enjoyable to read. The way Eelyn grew up was as a warrior. She was taught to never cry or show weakness to her enemies. This is stressed and mentioned multiple times throughout the book. While I get her journey is a hard one, I don’t understand how her upbringing of never showing weakness just crumbles and she starts crying all the time. She is a fierce warrior, yet in a span of a few weeks she throws away all she has grown up to believe and starts loving her enemies. For a girl with fire in her veins, as is said about her by other characters in the book, she seems awfully easy to get to comply as a dyr, a type of slave.

I love the idea of forbidden love and I believe, though used a lot, can still turn out good with its own twist. In this book, I find it hard to believe Eelyn is actually in love with Fiske. Fiske, who shot her with an arrow, bought her as a slave, and says this was all in the name of protecting her. I agree that these actions did help save her life, but were it not for him capturing her in the first place, the ENTIRE mess wouldn’t have happened.

Granted, this is the first snowflake in the snowball effect that creates this story. The two supposed lovebirds (although the word love is never mentioned to each other ,they do express strong feelings for one another) have barely spoken! I feel as a reader, I hardly know who Fiske is. I wish there was more dialogue to explain the feelings between the beloved Eelyn and this Fiske dude. Also, how exactly is Fiske able to kick Eelyn’s butt so easily? They have both trained as warriors, and Eelyn is out on the battlefield killing all these other trained warriors like she could do it in her sleep then Fiske comes along and her ass is handed to her in seconds?! I feel overall this book was lacking in dialogue; because of this we don’t get to know anyone really well, besides through the thoughts of Eelyn.

For example, besides Fiske, there is Myra, Eelyn’s supposed best friend. We don’t really see this proven through their limited interactions, we hardly even get a glimpse of who Myra is to Eelyn. My last wish for this book would be to have more dialogue between Eelyn and her brother. She has a lot of pent-up anger, and she's described as being pretty furious at him. Over time they have one brief discussion and that's it. I feel like Eelyn should’ve exploded or there should’ve been some sort of fight; instead the problem is just swept under the rug and never dealt with. Despite all this, it was a lovely simple day read. It left me wanting more for character relationships, because I liked the characters so much. The ending was sweet and refreshing compared to the common cliffhanger endings. This book didn’t really ignite the feels in me, but it was not in any way a bad book. If you're looking for a quick simple read I hope you’ll take this into consideration. I give it 4 stars.