Fiction Reviews
The Sky on Fire
(2024) Jenn Lyons, Tor, £22, hrdbk, 435pp, ISBN 978-1-035-04857-1
Having dragons as part of your Fantasy novel is pretty much a given these days, isn’t it? I must admit I do have a soft spot for them myself. With that in mind then I had high hopes for Jenn Lyons’ latest Fantasy novel, which combines a world where such creatures exist with a heist story.
The story focuses on Anahrod, a woman from the mountainous Sylands but who initially lives in the Deep, a swampy jungle region. Anahrod has the skill of being able to talk to and control animals, and at the start of the book she has a titan drake type dragon called Overbite who she uses to travel around. A group of people save her when she is being hunted down by warriors of Sicaryon, the King of the Unders, for reasons that become clear as the book progresses. Anahrod is then persuaded by this mercenary group and their attractive leader to go to the city of Yagra’hai and help them steal from a dragon’s hoard. Anahrod’s skills may be useful – but there is a problem. The dragon regent, Neveranimas, knows Anahrod – and she wants Anahrod dead.
I liked the world of the dragons, with a delineated society and culture. The dragon society, with each of the group bonded with a human rider, made me think of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels. The dragons here though are clearly dominant in the Skylands over the humans, or have been in the past, and the way that the rules and societal structures work in order to allow each to live and behave was interesting.
Less likeable for me was the use of themes currently popular in many other books at the moment, although I accept that these may also be reasons why readers may want to read this book. We’ve got romance of various shades and types, the ‘enemies become lovers’ trope, and the rather predictable found family as part of the plot, which are all well and good, but personally I found the ‘will they – won’t they’ aspect wearying after a while, and more disappointingly, predictable and expected. Even the inevitable ‘twists’ in the story left me uninspired.
There are some attempts at originality in the novel, but I found that they didn’t always work for me. For example, one of the original elements I disliked was the idea of rings worn on people’s arms that reflect and indicate their social, seΧual and romantic preferences. Known as ‘garden rings’, they could be a subtle way of making people’s interests clear to others without shouting it out loud, but to me what it really seemed to do is the opposite. It might be the Brit in me, but personally I think that getting to know what is unknown about another person is part of the fun of human relationships. It seemed like an interesting idea, but felt clumsy and perhaps even unwarranted.
More worryingly, it also didn’t help that I found it difficult to engage with the characters. I can see that part of the book is about Anharod ‘finding herself’ and so her character is initially rather enigmatic, but even as she develops and other characters are introduced by the end I was struggling to care about her or indeed any of the characters. They felt simple and uninspiring and I found it difficult to immerse myself in the story as a result. This may be as a result of the book’s fast pace, where things move so quickly I don’t think I had time to get to know the characters more.
Most problematically, I found the book’s plot a bit of a mess. While I think that the author wants to create a story that encompasses a wide-ranging and complex world, to me it just felt like an often unfocused, even directionless muddle. The first part of the book I quite liked, as it introduces the characters, although they do seem a little thin. There’s a lot of information dumping in the beginning as we see the world that Anharod lives in and the nature of the relationship between humans and their dragon overlords. It then becomes a travel story, followed by a heist story, followed by a story focussing on queer relationships.
Individually all of the parts sound great and at times the individual parts can be, but unfortunately together they all felt a bit forced forced, or at their worst box-ticking. The sign of a not-so-good book for me is when I am taken out of the narrative to see set pieces bolted together for a plot. This is what happened to me here.
By the end it seemed to me that rather than have a story that felt to have developed naturally (and yes, I realise that I am talking about that in a fantasy novel!) the author was juggling various disparate elements in order to draw them to a degree of conclusion. As seems to be de rigeur these days, there’s a cliff-hanger ending that will no doubt be continued in the next book.
Summing up, The Sky on Fire has a lot of great ideas, but a lot that didn’t work for me. I liked the dragons, but the rest was a hotch-potch of elements, with thinly developed and uninspiring characters that for me failed to jell together. I had high hopes for this one, but ultimately I was disappointed.
Mark Yon
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