The blurb:
Drink down the brew and dream of a better Earth.
Skyward Inn, within the high walls of the Western Protectorate, is a place of safety, where people come together to tell stories of the time before the war with Qita.
But safety from what? Qita surrendered without complaint when Earth invaded; Innkeepers Jem and Isley, veterans from either side, have regrets but few scars.
Their peace is disturbed when a visitor known to Isley comes to the Inn asking for help, bringing reminders of an unnerving past and triggering an uncertain future.
Did humanity really win the war?
The review:
There are some books, when you finish them, that evoke a feeling of “what the fuck did I just read?”.
Which sounds negative on the face of it, but sometimes it can mean that the book has left you thinking. Maybe it posed some difficult or interesting questions, or maybe it was just really, really weird. Sometimes, it can be both.
Skyward Inn was a story that took me a while to digest. I flew through it fairly quickly — it’s less than 160 pages, with a writing style that felt pretty “light” — but it took a few days for my thoughts on it to settle. On the face of it, the premise seems straightforward. There was a war between the humans and a race of aliens known as the Qita. The aliens surrendered almost immediately. Years later, in the aftermath, a human (Jem) and a Qitan (Isley) have opened the titular Skyward Inn to serve the people of the Western Protectorate — an independent portion of Devon, England where old-fashioned small town values are celebrated.
We spend the majority of our time in portion of the world, with POV chapters from Jem and her young son, Fosse. Jem spends the majority of her time tending the Inn with Isley, whereas Fosse rails against the suffocating atmosphere of the Protectorate. There’s a bit of a slice-of-life feel to these early chapters, but with a disturbing undercurrent that only gets stronger as the story grows into itself. Being such a short book, I don’t want to spoil too much, but Skyward Inn manages to touch on a few heavy subjects despite its seemingly narrow scope. It explores the interplay between community and independence, the selfish feelings that often go unspoken in parenthood, and it also pays some mind to the subject of colonialism (though I’m not sure how I feel about how the sci-fi aspects tied in to this specific part).
This is one of the first books in a long while to truly disturb me, and it did so in multiple ways. First of all… there are a few scenes near the beginning where Fosse insists on breaking into an abandoned farm so he can masturbate and play around with an axe to feel “powerful”. I don’t think I need to explain why I found those scenes disturbing, though I probably do need someone to explain to me why they absolutely had to exist. Secondly, and more seriously, the big questions posed by the second half of the novel really shook me on a personal level. Avoiding specifics, the whole idea of having to choose whether to belong or whether to be comfortable being your own person… That terrifies me, even outside of the fact that it’s a dichotomy I believe to be false.
Skyward Inn is a book that will stick with me for a long time… but I’m not entirely sure who I’d recommend it to. It’s very slow-paced, and character-focused in a way where I found none of the characters particularly likeable but found them interesting on account of their flaws and anxieties. It’s slice-of-life right up until it becomes some sort of weirdly-chill existential horror sci-fi. It has a disturbing portrayal of a young man with an infatuation that borders on the possessive, and also features an incredibly contagious disease which features heavily in the story. It’s… hard to put into a box.
Maybe if you’re a fan of books that are a little “out there”, and don’t mind feeling disturbed by what you read, then this will be the book for you. For me, it was somewhere in the region of a 4-star read. Lots to appreciate, lots to think about, but not something that blew me away.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review. Thank you to Rebellion for the review copy!
