Skyhunter
Year: 2020
Author: Marie Lu
Length: 718 minutes / 11.97 hours
A friend of mine is a fan of Marie Lu’s writing, and I thought the cover of this book looked interesting, so I gave it a shot. As a young adult dystopian novel, there’s not a lot that’s new here. It’s your same old young people fighting a force they don’t understand because those in charge tell them that the world will end if they don’t maintain the status quo. Fortunately, there were enough little things that made this a unique enough story that I’ll be continuing on with the second book at some point.
One of the reasons I appreciate diversity in main characters is it gives me a glimpse into how their world functions. With a mute character in first person point of view, it was the perfect trope to connect to the “antagonist” with a psychic bond that could easily provide the reader with a venue to get inside both their heads. Of course, this is also how the sudden romantic entanglement makes any sense here, as this is in the young adult genre and is almost a requirement for the main character.
Action-wise, there’s a lot of well-written scenes that help drive the plot forward. And that the plot reveals enough to be interesting but not too much so that I have to read the second book in this series to get a satisfying conclusion is a hallmark of a well-written book. Sure, it still has to meet all the checkboxes to give the young adult fans what they want, but I’m glad that it’s not necessarily a straight copy and paste from more famous young adult series that we seem to get most of the time.
An interesting point of view from a fairly standard young adult novel, I give Skyhunter 4.0 stars out of 5.
