Untethered Sky

This story of a young trainer of rocs (y'know, those giant eagles from tales of Sinbad and Arabian Nights) was not bad. Fonda Lee is a pretty good writer and can set the scene with evocative details and description. There are a number of fast-paced action scenes as well, which are pretty thrilling. However, overall the story was a bit on the ordinary side (as tales of magical creatures fighting other magical creatures go). The story spent a lot of time either with the training/bonding aspect of the protagonist (Ester) with her bird (Zahra), or with her experience growing up and making her way as a ruhker. There was definitely a “young adult” flavour to this story not only because it spent a little time on crushes and love triangles, but mainly because the point of view was a young woman who was growing in life experience throughout the story (and naturally makes some juvenile choices along the way). I wish that there had been less time spent on the technical, falconry-adjacent, aspects of being a ruhker, in favour of more world-building beyond that profession and their manticore-hunting mandate. Even though it was clearly a familiar, Arabian-inspired world, expanding on that world in imaginative ways could have made the story a lot more interesting. Or, we could also have spent more time in mind of Ester. She experienced a lot of trauma in her backstory so it probably would have been pretty engaging to explore how she's been coping and growing all these years. How did she manage to become a successful ruhker after all the disadvantages of a troubled past? I guess the most disappointing aspect of this novella was that by the end of it, I had no real desire to revisit that world or for this story to have kept exploring deeper.