Sky in the deep – Adrienne Young (review)

Title: Sky in the deep.

Author: Adrienne Young.

Format: Audiobook.

Publisher: Wednesday Books.

Page count: 340 (8h 41min).

Release day: April 24^th 2018.

Genre: YA, fantasy.

Rating: 2 stars.

What is it about? (Summary from GoodReads)

Raised to be a warrior, seventeen-year-old Eelyn fights alongside her Aska clansmen in an ancient rivalry against the Riki clan. Her life is brutal but simple: fight and survive. Until the day she sees the impossible on the battlefield—her brother, fighting with the enemy—the brother she watched die five years ago.

Faced with her brother’s betrayal, she must survive the winter in the mountains with the Riki, in a village where every neighbour is an enemy, every battle scar possibly one she delivered. But when the Riki village is raided by a ruthless clan thought to be a legend, Eelyn is even more desperate to get back to her beloved family.

She is given no choice but to trust Fiske, her brother’s friend, who sees her as a threat. They must do the impossible: unite the clans to fight together, or risk being slaughtered one by one. Driven by a love for her clan and her growing love for Fiske, Eelyn must confront her own definition of loyalty and family while daring to put her faith in the people she’s spent her life hating.

Part Wonder Woman, part Vikings—and all heart.

Rating:

Earlier this week I did a post about my rating system (see here!), so I thought I would show it to you in practice.

Characters: 3/10

Atmosphere: 4/10

Writing: 6/10

Plot: 6/10

Intrigue: 4/10

Logic: 5/10

Enjoyment: 4/10

Average: 4.5 (which means 2 stars!)

My thoughts:

I will try and explain these ratings!

My main problem with this book is that I just did not care for the characters, and that made it very hard to care for what happened to them in the plot. Because the plot was interesting. But it would have been better if the author made me care for the characters more!

I think the beginning of this book went a bit too fast, and that is why I didn’t care too much. Right in the beginning we are in this fight and she ‘kidnapped’ by their enemy. But at this point I didn’t know anything about the Aska and the Riki, or our main character.. I think I needed a bit more of an introduction before this happened, not a long one, but just a little bit.

One of the big things is that she thought her brother died, but he actually joined up with their ‘enemy’ (I don’t feel like it is ever properly explained why they are enemies?! But maybe I just missed that). And I think this could have been interesting if, again, we cared more for our main character. Now it was just like ‘oh hey, I see my brother fighting with the enemy, I thought he died 5 years ago?’

Eelyn kept saying ‘I could kill all of them within minutes’, but without doing anything. It started to annoy me at some point, either do it or shut up haha. And then there was this ‘romance’ which did not make any sense whatsoever. It felt like it was just there for the sake of there to be a romance. I get that there had to be some kind of relation build up between these people for some of the plot points to make sense. But I think it could have worked out with a friendship!

I did enjoy the writing! So I’m definitely interested in reading the companion novel, The girl the sea gave back. And I’ve actually heard that people enjoy that one more!

Have you read this book? What did you think?