Title: Sky in the Deep
Author: Adrienne Young
Series: Sky in the Deep #1
Genre: Ya/Fantasy/War
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Publication Date: April 24th, 2018
Edition: Kindle Edition, 352 pages
Source: NetGalley
Synopsis:
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: train to fight and fight to 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.
Eelyn loses her focus and is captured. Now, she must survive the winter in the mountains with the Riki, in a village where every neighbor is an enemy, every battle scar possibly one she delivered. But when the Riki village is raided by a ruthless clan settling in the valley, 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. 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 to find a way to forgive her brother while daring to put her faith in the people she’s spent her life hating.
Review:
This book was so good. If you are someone who doesn't read YA, this might be a book to read anyway. Too often in YA, when we are given a character who is raised to be a warrior we are also given a character devoid of emotion beyond anger. Eelyan behaves like a human, she feels an array of emotions, she is still a warrior but when she is in a situation where her anger and sadness have claimed her she lets it show with tears the way a human would.
There are some really amazing characters in this book, and the setting is just amazing. this is the first time I have read a book about Vikings, and while I don't know a great deal about their culture, the culture created for this book felt real. And the all the characters felt like real people. They reacted to things the way you'd expect people to react in their situation.
I feel like I should mention this, in case it's not something you want to read, but there is a good deal of violence in this book. One particular scene got to me and I had to put the book down for a few. It's a fairly graphic torture scene where the MC pops a man's eye out with her thumb. I am going very light on the detail here in my review the actual passage in the book goes into almost unnecessary detail. It was very gross.
I also really like that this is a standalone novel. That's something else that I feel like is pushed too often. To make everything a series.
This was a fantastic book. Highly recommend.
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