Review: Skyhunter

Skyhunter by Marie Lu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

And to stop myself from stressing out too much about this year's increasingly nerve-wracking election results, I hereby review Marie Lu's latest YA fantasy thriller - somewhat in the vein of The Young Elites, and yet, coming across as even deeper into the future than any of her scary apocalyptic future visions, with its depiction of the ruins of the Early Ones (basically, modern society.) Though unlike The Young Elites, it shies away somewhat from having straight-up counterpart cultures - you know, how the Sealands took inspiration from Italy, Spain, and Malta; the Skylands were Anglo-French; the Sunlands were North African-like, that sort of thing. But reading this book, it's still not hard to read it as a critique of America, with the Karensa Federation being imperialist as hell and only one nation on the entire continent refusing to fall to the Federation and its reanimated Ghost armies and poison gas attacks - the latter of which have caused our protagonist Talin to lose her voice permanently due to scars on her vocal chords, meaning she must communicate in sign language. A bit of a combination of Adelina, disabled as a young girl, and Elisa from The Shape of Water with the specific disability Lu wrote into her character. As with most of Lu's books, though, this one is not only smart and thoughtful in its sociopolitical critique, but amazingly fast-paced in its action as well. Though this time, it builds up to a positively Aveyardian cliffhanger, reminding me so much of Glass Sword it's not even funny. One thing's for sure, I hope Lu gets to go on tour in person for the inevitable sequel to this one - which, if I'm not wrong, will once again be the conclusion of a duology. At least I know from Warcross that Lu's one of those authors who can do the duology trend right...

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