The Sky on Fire

This was a very 2024 book.

First of all, it's a lot of fun. It feels so modern, with splashy characters, a super fast pace, very neat and tidy plot twists, a fairly technologically advanced world - I loved reading this book. If you are a fantasy fan and love dragons, you will love reading this book. The “crew” felt like Mistborn, the world was vibrant and cartoonish (and much, much brighter than I expected), and I really liked the general pace of the story. It worked. The ending was good.

Rant below.

This book is advertised as romantasy. It is not romantasy. It is an epic fantasy novel.

Jenn Lyons already has a reputation for excessively horny books. So do Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros. The difference is that the popularity of Maas and Yarros comes from the shock value of their protagonists' horniness, the protagonist's and reader's feeling that what's going on is so inappropriate that we really shouldn't be reading this, but god damn, we can feel this way anyway.

The horniness, among other things in this book, is so natural and normative that it provides no shock value or excitement, even in a very descriptive scene near the end of the book. Instead of the incredibly effective, unshameless frustration of Maas and Yarros that comes across so easily in their writing, Lyons's horniness has always just seemed her natural style, no different from her previous series, A Chorus of Dragons. I would think a new reader would pick up on this as well, that this is an author who has no issue writing this way and is doing so completely shamelessly.

The same applies to the queernormativity, which is really well thought out, but again, so natural that it doesn't really make a difference to the story at all. I thought it was interesting, but I didn't feel it had any relation to real-world queer issues at all, and I'd be very hesitant to recommend this book as “queer rep” despite it featuring a very queer central relationship.

The most obvious example of this is the portrayal of transgender people. Everyone in this society wears rings to signify their gender and sexuality in public. if you're trans, you get a magical inscription to instantly undergo gender reassignment, and you can wear a ring to signify that you have done so. Some trans people probably envision this world as their dream, and some may be insulted by the ease of it all. Is writing an incredibly queernormative world really good queer representation? I'm not sure anyone really has a conclusive answer to that. This book is maybe at least a good place to start the discussion.

Regardless, I have to assume that the link is just either a very loose take on Fourth Wing (it's better than Fourth Wing), or Tor/MacMillan trying somewhat desperately to get this book to go viral, which it won't. But it's good, and interesting, and addictive. Read it! 8/10 from me.