“We read omens in the clouds.”

“And?”

His head lowered. His voice was nearly a whisper, “They warn of a storm to end all storms. A reckoning.”

Skyshade by Alex Aster

My Review

“You feel it, don’t you?” The augur said, watching her far too closely. “Power… it’s in the blood, you see.”

So. It wasn’t as bad as Nightbane. But Skyshade wasn’t that great either.

Despite the fact that I made the conscious decision to “hate read” this book (and this series in general), I always have this hope inside me that the book will exceed my expectations completely and turn out to be at least decent. This hasn’t really been the case with the novels in the Lightlark Saga, unfortunately. I’ve found all three books to be disappointing in some way, though some definitely more than others.

Let’s start with the one thing that I legitimately liked – the cover. Whoever the publisher has do the Lightlark book covers does a great job. The book cover art is always eye-catching and gorgeous.

Now for everything else.

Heart. Hers was split in half. One part wanted him more than anything- remembered. Another wanted to stab him through the chest again.

The characters continue to be either insufferable and annoying, or bland and irrelevant. Isla Crown somehow becomes worse. She doesn’t learn from any of her experiences or training really from the last book and continues to eff everyone over with her powers – whether it be her refusing to use them or letting them completely out of control. Also, she’s an actual serial killer now, guys! WTF, I know. It’s just, ugh. I hated her before, so now I don’t know what to feel.

It’s even more annoying because both of the “hot” 500+ year old men that she can’t choose between completely forgive her for this. Grimshaw is absolutely no surprise, he’s even worse than Isla is, but Oro… Dude, you can do so much better than her. (Oro and Isla also continue to have no chemistry, btw.)

“You’re right. I don’t know what love is. I don’t know how to love. If you ever gave me another chance to love you, I would learn. I would learn the right way to love you.”

The other side characters once again didn’t really matter, and the other two rulers – Cleo and Azul – hardly made appearances. (Except for when the plot needed them to be, or Isla needed a plot device.) Also, what the heck happened with the Starlings this book? Did Aster forget about them? Because the Wildlings showed up, but sometimes in Skyshade it seems like she forgot that the Starlings were now Isla’s people too and not just the Wildlings, seeing as I don’t think they show up at all.

The writing still wasn’t the best. There have been some improvements from Nightbane, but it’s still not that great. However, I will say that the majority of the things I noticed while reading had to do with editing. (But these mistakes definitely should have been caught in editing.)

Here’s some weird prose, or writing and editing mistakes I noticed:

“Remember?” the old woman said. “I’m still finding blood stains in my floorboards.”

(I’m pretty sure it should say “on my floorboards”, but I could be wrong…)

She took his hand. Grim’s wide shoulders melted in relief until she said, “Take methere.”

(I swear to you, this IS NOT a typo on my part – this was exactly how it was in the book. There are also several paragraph errors in Skyshade, whether it be a paragraph break where there shouldn’t be one or a lack of a paragraph break where there should.)

“Your blood spoke to me in many tongues. You wear your fate like a crown of blades. Doesn’t it hurt?”

(This one reads very oddly to me. I know there’s something wrong with it, but I guess I’m having trouble putting it into words at the moment.)

(Anyway.)

The story itself… At the very least, it’s fast-paced so it didn’t feel like it lasted too long whilst reading. The actual plot was, hm, meh. It could have been worse. I didn’t like the Big Plot Twist, however, mostly because it wasn’t foreshadowed properly at all. Like, there was pretty much no chance that you could guess what or who it was – it just appears before you and you’re like “Huh?” The way it was handled was just frustrating and bad.

Oh, wait! I just remembered, there was another thing that I did like a little about this book. It suddenly got unexpectedly kind of morbid, which I kind of enjoyed only because it came a bit out of nowhere. But yeah, kudos to the novel for impressing me there, I guess.

“Many would have died. Only the strongest would have made it through. Many did die, in the creation of Lightlark. Their bodies were used as the foundation of the island. It gave it power. Did you know?”

So yeah, even though I hadn’t gotten my hopes up or anything, I didn’t enjoy Skyshade. Lightlark is still the best book in this series so far, guys. It was nice to see that it seems that Asters writing improved a little bit. (But it could be much better than it is.)

Though I didn’t like this book, I think that ACOTAR and Fourth Wing fans, as well as fans of that type of romantasy in general, will probably enjoy Skyshade and the other novels in the Lightlark Saga. People that like YA fantasy and don’t care about how good the pride is might like it as well.

As always, thank you to everyone for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful day/night!

See ya ~Mar

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