It starts with a rift that burns a thousand scars into the sky.
It makes the winds stop.
It makes the stars go dark.
It awakens an ancient beast.
And with it, a new reign of blood.
It is the Summoning.
And at the heart of it is fire.
***
When the Summoner’s army blazes through her village, Dove is forced into hiding. Torn from everything she knows, she begins training in the elements with only one goal in mind: to find her brother. She just needs to get past the Summoner’s army—but how can she slay a dragon that is already dead?
Devin
This is a tough one to review because I have two completely different opinions about it living side by side—something akin to a separation of heart and mind. So, this is a bit like asking whether you want the good news or the bad news first… feel free to read the following sections in whichever order depending on your preference.
Good News
I really enjoyed this book. It was never a chore to pick up and it never felt slow, in fact I think it’s the most fun I’ve had reading for SPFBO so far this year. Burn Red Skies has an energy and a voice about it, two things it can be quite difficult to learn as an author if they doesn’t come naturally. It also has grandiosity. It’s thinking big. Epic. Showy. Cool. Why have a dull fight when you can kill people with ice swords? Why not have a floating city and airships but also summonable dragons? In places, Burn Red Skies is also very funny. One only has to read Bard’s comments about his far more manly hair not making him feel better to recognise that the author is having as much fun writing as I am having reading.
I also adored the characters as people, each having a lived history that felt tangible on the page but never bogged them down. Bard and Dancer in particular were utterly enjoyable to read, Dove’s lack of speech makes her an interesting main protagonist, Valerya is carved from my grumpy soul, and I’m very intrigued by Gryff’s journey and am curious to see where it leads. Each of them leaves me wanting to know more about them and where they’re heading, especially since Valerya is in quite the bind, and Dancer is still a total (yet delightful) mystery.
Bad News
Almost none of it made sense. I was frequently left with the feeling I had skipped a few pages or whole chapters, but no, Burn Red Skies has what I would call the opposite of an infodumping problem. I get the sense that the author knows A LOT about this world and it’s not that the answers to my questions don’t exist, merely that they weren’t well communicated to a reader coming into the book without that dense base of knowledge. The following will contain some spoilers, so skip ahead if you want to avoid them.
Questions I still have despite the book assuming I know the answers:
- What is the purge? (started to put together a vague maybe answer near the end but it was never clearly explained)
- While I eventually got that the Spades are the elite soldiers and the Swordsworn are the standard soldiers, what are Falcons and Hounds and why are people called this all the time?
- Why does everyone keep treating Dove like she’s a super special human that needs to be protected?
- What actually IS the plot? The characters all kind of pick sides on what seems to be a war, but no one declares a war and there’s not so much a battle as a random skirmish that no one explains. Motivations are extremely unclear, I feel like the characters all totally know why they are doing things but again, they aren’t communicated to the reader.
- Further to which, why do the random sky pirates end up being the main people fighting for one side rather than… ANY of that place’s actual people?
I have a lot more, they’re just not coming to mind right now and I don’t want to flood everyone with spoilers, so I’ll move on.
The other issue that is built on top of this lack of understanding of the world and its politics, and vague character motivations, is that it leaves our protagonists with next to no agency. Whatever is said about him ‘having made his choice’ Gryff makes no choice, having been forced into his position and told to flourish or die. Dove is just blown around from moment to moment with no goal and makes no meaningful decisions. Even our grumpy She-Jackel is just stuck doing what she’s told by her king with the occasional moments of small, petty refusal. At least the sky pirates make decisions, I just didn’t understand what they were and why, so they had no weight. And without having any idea of what the king’s goals are beyond being an absolute asshat as much as possible, the outcome of the climactic skirmish is a shrug.
Conclusion
All in all, I would say that Burn Red Skies does well the things that are difficult to teach and fails to come up to scratch on all the things that are far more structural. Despite having NO IDEA what was going on or why, I still enjoyed reading it, which makes me wonder just how good this book could be if it was overhauled with these structural issues in mind. Which is to say, I will totally keep an eye out for the author’s future books.
For SPFBO, I tend to weight my enjoyment quite highly so despite all of the above issues, I’m giving Burn Red Skies a 7.
Jared
A world at war, with a rapacious empire set on conquering – and reconquering all it can see. Said empire is underpinned not only by a mighty legion but by the prowess of General Valerya, a summoner of generational talent, with the power to bring forth an unstoppable dragon.
There’s a lot going on in Burn Red Skies. There are airships. There are caste tattoos. There’s an elemental / bloodline magic system. There are mind-readers. There’s a truly nasty emperor. There’s a band of mercenary-adventurer-smugglers, that all have pasts. There’s a big ol’ dragon. Assassins! An absolute smorgasbord of the fantastical, with lots of stuff happening. The glue, such as it is, comes in the form of two point of view characters: Dove and Gryff – two children from a conquered village, on separate (but equally epic) paths in life. Although there’s a host of other point of view characters – mercenaries and soldiers and emperors alike – Dove and Gryff are the central dynamic to the book, with arcs that (somewhat) parallel one another in the empire and its resistance.
As noted, there’s a lot happening here, and, as Devin points out above, Burn Red Skies is not – perhaps by design – easy to follow. The plot triple-jumps from one place to another; one set-piece scenario to the next. It all ties together in an inevitable ensemble smackdown, but the journey to get there is confusing and somewhat frenetic. Our characters don’t journey from A to B so much as they teleport straight to D, with the occasional reference to a C that has been seemingly excised from the book. It makes the narrative difficult to follow, and, as much as the scenes that do exist are important to the plot, I can’t help but be disappointed about what we’re missing.
I do admire a book that’s willing to throw its reader in at the deep end, but Burn Red Skies does so with a little too much vigour. That said, despite the gaps, builds to a mostly coherent, extremely cinematic, and suitably explosive conclusion. (4/10)
Hiu
If there’s one thing that Burn Red Skies has taught me, it’s the important of context and pacing in a book.
Because man, look. I had a lot of fun with this story. What I’m always crying out for in a SPFBO book is a sense of personality, and this has that in spades. Like Devin said earlier, you can really tell that the author had a hell of a fun time putting this together.
But I dunno. Sometimes it left me feeling like I’d walked into a room full of laughter, but had missed the punchline? Like… I’m glad you’re having fun, guys, but I want to be let in on the joke! But in Burn Red Skies, the conversation just keeps flowing.
And there are merits to that. A lot of the fun in this book stems from that fast-paced, never-look-back style. But I just feel like with a little (in all honestly, probably a lot) more context, Burn Red Skies would have elevated itself another star rating, easy. There are so many cool ideas here, I just wanted to understand them a little more.
This is most frustrating when it comes to the plot. Because although a lot of stuff happens, I’d be hard pressed to tell you why it is happening. Or, in some cases, what that stuff actually is. Trying to keep a grasp of the narrative thread here is a bit of a fistful-of-sand situation. Sometimes the information is there — just not clearly signposted — and sometimes it isn’t. It doesn’t help that our characters zoom around the setting a lot, never quite stopping long enough to lend any weight or significance to a particular area.
“Here’s a sky city! Look at how cool it is! Okay let’s move on! Will we come back? Haha, fuck off, no. Let’s go see this town that’s burning down!”
But it’s a testament to the author’s strengths that, a lot of the time, I didn’t really mind. I was happy to treat the story as a sandbox for the characters to keep doing their thing. The personalities here are colourful, if not full of depth, and quite honestly are the driving force of this story.
This is a hard one to score for many reasons. Weighting enjoyment against any attempt at “objective” critique is difficult enough as it is. But this is a book that nails some of the hardest parts of writing, but in my opinion trips over some of the fundamentals.
The SPFBO hivemind demands a number though, so…
I’m scoring this one 6.5 out of 10.
