By the Skies by J.E. Mueller [SPFBO]

The Blurb:

Kariea has turned healing into an art. Despite attending the best academy in Arix, she’s only allowed to study what her family approves. They want a lady; she wants more.

The dragon magic of old has granted everyone power. Kareia doesn’t intend to squander it. Though she’s forced to learn other arts in secret, an unexpected friend offers to teach her move. Even better, he isn’t afraid to break a few rules.

All the better for Kariea. With an arranged marriage in her future, she’s running out of time. Luckily, the law of the land is on her side: she can duel her betrothed and win her freedom… provided she can sneak in a little training first.

Can Kariea hone the skills she needs to win? Or will she be forced to accept an unwanted marriage?

This book contains some material that might be triggering for certain audiences. Themes of gaslighting, abuse, and sexual assault are seen in this book.

Devin’s Review

I was immediately drawn to the concept of this book. A woman choosing to duel her arranged husband because she doesn’t want to marry him! Yes! You go girl! But… Unfortunately the thrilling magical tale of a woman setting fire to the patriarchy and maybe finding love along the way wasn’t what I got. Now, I don’t want to review a book based on what it’s not or what I wanted, but I do think this disconnect is worth talking about.

Right. So. By The Skies is a first person, magic school story, but unfortunately for all the glorious possibilities of a magic school (and I do love me a magic school), I never got a sense of place here. Thanks to a single offhand comment it seemed to be situated within a castle, yet that was all I learned about it. What it looked like or where it was, anything about its layout, its aesthetic, it’s mood—all of that was lacking. The world seemed to exist only when it was required for the plot rather than possessing a sense of permanency. The magical classes were similar. They were better described than the setting, yet I still couldn’t get a sense of structure or time, neither seeming to exist until it was necessary to bring the main character and her new love interest together. World building permanency (the sense that the wider world exists even when the characters are not directly interacting with it) is a common difficulty in fantasy novels because the whole world exists constantly in the author’s imagination, so it takes good editorial feedback to point out all the places where this is not making it from brain to page.

Overall it’s an easy read, hitting many conventional tropes (MC being unwittingly overpowered, having unique abilities, and being Desired By All The Mens), and while the world building permanency was lacking, that’s a common pitfall I could move on without. For me the biggest two issues that led me to DNF were actually structural and thematic.

Structurally this book is all over the place. Based on the back copy and the first third of the book, the main conflict seems to be the marriage our MC doesn’t want and the desire to learn to harness her powerful magic so she can duel the guy. Great. Yet from the beginning they’re engaged and he’s entirely absent. She just tells us how awful he is while vaguely thinking about how to escape having to marry him. He doesn’t show up to be at all threatening until about the 40% mark. By then he’s not actually a threat anymore, because at the 15% mark, we learn she was never going to have to marry him anyway because one of her friends had A Plan to get her out of it, which removes all sense of stakes from the main plot. A secondary, non-relationship based plot line is introduced around the 1/3rd point, but since the main plot never had an inciting incident, this feels like the first thing that actually happens. I am ALL HERE for romance-based main plots, I was a romance reader before I was a fantasy reader, but even in the romance there is no sense of stakes. She and her new love interest like each other immediately and there are multiple outs to her having to marry the awful guy regardless of what happens. And yes, he is quite awful. Extra points to the author for having put a content warning at the beginning of the book, it was very appreciated.

All right, here is where it gets difficult. Thematic issues. So, you know how I said I wanted that burn the patriarchy book? Well, we don’t always get what we want and that’s fine, but in many ways this book turned out to be the complete opposite while trying to convince me it wasn’t.

By The Skies takes place in an intensely patriarchal world where women get no choice over who they marry, are only allowed to wear pants on specific outdoorsy occasions, and are limited in what they can learn with their magic in school because men don’t want to marry women who are more magically proficient than they are. While this is all presented as Bad, our main character tends to shrug and say that’s just how it is even while wishing for more. She is planning to duel her arranged husband and is secretly learning things she shouldn’t, and while she’s burning no patriarchy these small defiances would make for a fine alternative. Except that the text is, at the same time, happily misogynistic.

Our heroine is Not Like Other Girls. It’s made clear very early on that the other girls at the school are all “eyelash-batting bores” from whose dull conversation our heroine is the only escape. Some of her friends are spared the full force of this denigration, while for others it becomes their only character trait, somehow being bad enough to put them in the place of our required School Enemies. In no way does the text examine this bias, and being in the first person this commentary comes from the mouth of our main character with no consideration that she’s playing into the broader social misogyny she’s seemingly trying to fight against. Instead she prefers to believe herself special and better than them for not knowing how to do her own makeup.

Also while there is value in her attempting to escape the arranged marriage with her own skill, all the ways she is prevented from doing so are solved for her by the literal swooping in of a man to whom she only has to woe about her problems for him to fix everything for her. Our hero shows up within a few pages and immediately likes her for her aforementioned not being like other girls. In fact it’s made quite clear that he is also One Of The Rare Good Ones, to the point of espousing about how wrong it is that women aren’t allowed to train their magic or make their own marriage choices. This enlightenment forms a convenient out for the heroine, able to escape the patriarchal world through this One Good Man because she is Not Like Other Girls.

Between the devaluing of all things feminine, the eyelash-batting bores, the hero saving her from all her problems, and a dragon of a controlling mother referred to by her father as “a mistake” who blackmailed her way into a marriage, I started to get the feeling the text was not so much anti-patriarchal as anti-women in all too many subtle ways, while trying to tell me it wasn’t.

Despite these issues, all in all, what I read was light and easy and full of common magic school tropes, so if that’s your jam this one might be for you, especially if you prefer your social-norms traditional. Unfortunately, the cons outweighed the pros for me with this book and I’m going to have to cut it from my batch having DNFed at about the 50%.

To check out our other SPFBO 7 reviews and keep up to date on which books are still in the running, check out our SPFBO 7 Hub page here.