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A review by trike
Updraft by Fran Wilde
2.0
In one of the book group discussions someone mentioned that this felt like a first draft rather than a finished novel. That's pretty accurate.
The writing is competent, so for not being actively terrible and because she doesn't have the heroine become romantically entangled with the Supporting Boy, aka Flying Samwise Gamgee, I'll give it 2 stars.
Worldbuilding - People are raving about the worldbuilding here, which I don't understand. It's easily one of the weakest parts of the book. I suppose if you've never read the works of people like John Varley, Philip Jose Farmer or Anne McCaffrey this might be intriguing, but it pales in comparison to the great examples out there.
I never got a real sense of the city's size. Wilde says some of the bone towers are far away, but they feel clustered together. Bridges can easily be built between many of them using the sinew of flying monsters called "skymouths." (We'll get to those.) Honestly, this feels more like a high school in scope rather than a city. Only the top few tiers of the bone towers are habitable because as the towers grow the walls close in, crowding out the residents.
The towers extend above the clouds, so where does their water come from? Where does their food grow? They have honey but no bees. They have clothes and wings, but there's no evidence of the industry required to make these things. At one point the heroine, Kirit, mentions that she has silk spiders, so presumably the fabrics are made from their webs, but it feels like she's basically keeping a terrarium of arachnids, not the warehouses full of them which would be needed for making so much stuff.
It's also hard to tell how many people there are. It feels like dozens, but it must be thousands.
I'm guessing the answer to these questions is meant to be "because magic," but if a reader is asking these fundamental questions about how your society functions, then you've done a poor job at worldbuilding.
Flying - Specifically, how? Based on the original cover and the description, it looks like they're using some sort of hang glider, except with finer control. Maybe it's meant to look more like Da Vinci's bat-winged glider than a modern hang glider in our world, but that doesn't explain how they can do the various things they do, such as fold their wings back to dive or lock them into position to right.
Now this is one aspect where I would normally go,"Yeah, it's magic, fine," the way I do with Iron Man's suit. That suit could neither protect Tony nor fly the way it's depicted. But the reason I buy into the utter implausibility of Iron Man's armor is because the rest of his world doesn't make me ask fundamental questions.
If you want people to buy into your big impossibility, you need to make the little details believable.
Kirit - The main character is too competent. She's the Chosen One in all but name. She passes her wingtest (a final exam that is half oral exam and half advanced driver's test except with flying) with flying colors (hoho!) yet she is failed due to politics. Then she's forced to go toHogwarts The Spire, where she's so good she learns everything she needs to know in days or weeks (it's kind of unclear), things that have taken other, very skilled students months or years to learn.
In one sequence she learns to use echolocation in an afternoon, while the student she's paired with took more than a year to master the skill. Despite the fact Kirit's older and the other girl, Stellis, was raised in the Spire. A bit of the Mary Sue, here.
Skymouths - Invisible sky monsters! See-through air dragons! Based on the descriptions of skymouths, they seem to be flying squidsharks. Meaning that they have tentacles like a squid but the tooth-filled maws of sharks. Their teeth are glass-like, but their skins seem to be more like a squid's chromatophores, except magically more so, rendering them completely invisible.
Again, this is another area where I'd have no problem writing these fanciful beasts off as magical critters, except their abilities change according to the needs of the story. At the end, Kirit faces a skymouth that is gigantic, which basically swallowed up another person whole, but the tiny vegetarian skymouth Kirit is carrying is somehow able to choke it to death from inside the big one's mouth. This little skymouth is a scavenger that her platonic pal had in his hideaway, and he is able to hold it in his cupped hands. Which means that it is the size of a kitten. Even if you add the length of its tentacles at full extension, it's hard to believe that something that small could somehow close the throat of a monster big enough to gulp down an adult human being.
That'd be like some dinner calamari taking out Bruce the shark from Jaws.
The book just didn't sell me on this world. [b:Windhaven|67957|Windhaven|George R.R. Martin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388467654s/67957.jpg|2960816] by Lisa Tuttle and George R.R. Martin is a more plausible version of this story. Even the fundamentally-broken [b:Archangel|97961|Archangel (Samaria, #1)|Sharon Shinn|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388606676s/97961.jpg|3102308] series by Sharon Shinn makes more sense. (Although there she basically just combined McCaffrey's dragons and riders from Pern into a single winged person and kept the exact same plot and characters.)
The writing is competent, so for not being actively terrible and because she doesn't have the heroine become romantically entangled with the Supporting Boy, aka Flying Samwise Gamgee, I'll give it 2 stars.
Worldbuilding - People are raving about the worldbuilding here, which I don't understand. It's easily one of the weakest parts of the book. I suppose if you've never read the works of people like John Varley, Philip Jose Farmer or Anne McCaffrey this might be intriguing, but it pales in comparison to the great examples out there.
I never got a real sense of the city's size. Wilde says some of the bone towers are far away, but they feel clustered together. Bridges can easily be built between many of them using the sinew of flying monsters called "skymouths." (We'll get to those.) Honestly, this feels more like a high school in scope rather than a city. Only the top few tiers of the bone towers are habitable because as the towers grow the walls close in, crowding out the residents.
The towers extend above the clouds, so where does their water come from? Where does their food grow? They have honey but no bees. They have clothes and wings, but there's no evidence of the industry required to make these things. At one point the heroine, Kirit, mentions that she has silk spiders, so presumably the fabrics are made from their webs, but it feels like she's basically keeping a terrarium of arachnids, not the warehouses full of them which would be needed for making so much stuff.
It's also hard to tell how many people there are. It feels like dozens, but it must be thousands.
I'm guessing the answer to these questions is meant to be "because magic," but if a reader is asking these fundamental questions about how your society functions, then you've done a poor job at worldbuilding.
Flying - Specifically, how? Based on the original cover and the description, it looks like they're using some sort of hang glider, except with finer control. Maybe it's meant to look more like Da Vinci's bat-winged glider than a modern hang glider in our world, but that doesn't explain how they can do the various things they do, such as fold their wings back to dive or lock them into position to right.
Now this is one aspect where I would normally go,"Yeah, it's magic, fine," the way I do with Iron Man's suit. That suit could neither protect Tony nor fly the way it's depicted. But the reason I buy into the utter implausibility of Iron Man's armor is because the rest of his world doesn't make me ask fundamental questions.
If you want people to buy into your big impossibility, you need to make the little details believable.
Kirit - The main character is too competent. She's the Chosen One in all but name. She passes her wingtest (a final exam that is half oral exam and half advanced driver's test except with flying) with flying colors (hoho!) yet she is failed due to politics. Then she's forced to go to
In one sequence she learns to use echolocation in an afternoon, while the student she's paired with took more than a year to master the skill. Despite the fact Kirit's older and the other girl, Stellis, was raised in the Spire. A bit of the Mary Sue, here.
Skymouths - Invisible sky monsters! See-through air dragons! Based on the descriptions of skymouths, they seem to be flying squidsharks. Meaning that they have tentacles like a squid but the tooth-filled maws of sharks. Their teeth are glass-like, but their skins seem to be more like a squid's chromatophores, except magically more so, rendering them completely invisible.
Again, this is another area where I'd have no problem writing these fanciful beasts off as magical critters, except their abilities change according to the needs of the story. At the end, Kirit faces a skymouth that is gigantic, which basically swallowed up another person whole, but the tiny vegetarian skymouth Kirit is carrying is somehow able to choke it to death from inside the big one's mouth. This little skymouth is a scavenger that her platonic pal had in his hideaway, and he is able to hold it in his cupped hands. Which means that it is the size of a kitten. Even if you add the length of its tentacles at full extension, it's hard to believe that something that small could somehow close the throat of a monster big enough to gulp down an adult human being.
That'd be like some dinner calamari taking out Bruce the shark from Jaws.
The book just didn't sell me on this world. [b:Windhaven|67957|Windhaven|George R.R. Martin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388467654s/67957.jpg|2960816] by Lisa Tuttle and George R.R. Martin is a more plausible version of this story. Even the fundamentally-broken [b:Archangel|97961|Archangel (Samaria, #1)|Sharon Shinn|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388606676s/97961.jpg|3102308] series by Sharon Shinn makes more sense. (Although there she basically just combined McCaffrey's dragons and riders from Pern into a single winged person and kept the exact same plot and characters.)