Thanks to NetGalley and Tordotcom for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review.
I feel bad about this, but Untethered Sky was just all right for me. I never warmed to it, not for any particular reason. The book is well-written (though nothing about the writing did much for me personally), the character arcs make sense, the world-building is (theoretically) interesting, and the presence of the manticores is genuinely frightening (this is one of the few things that 100% worked for me). Maybe this needed to be a full novel for it to work for me? Regardless, not the best first experience to have with an author, a resounding ‘meh’.
Our main character is Ester, whose family was devastated by a manticore when she was very young. She grew up wanting to hunt monsters, and this led her to want to become a ruhker, the people who train and fly rocs (very large birds of prey, though not as large as most myths would have them) which are the only known predator that can kill a manticore. We follow as Ester trains, and is finally given a roc, a juvenile female named Zahra.
For such a small book, this covers a pretty long period of time, taking us all the way through until Ester is an adult and full ruhker, when she and all the other ruhkers are involved in a nationwide effort to kill as many manticores as possible.
The thing is, this is a book I should have loved. I love animals in books, especially ones that develop special bonds with humans; I love training sequences; I love when we get to watch characters grow from childhood; I hate manticores bc they are scary. But none of this made any sort of dent on my emotions. I just felt really emotionally removed from all of it while reading. Chalk it up to the writing style just not being for me, I guess. I hope many people have better experiences with this book than I did, but the results here aren’t making me want to jump up and go check out any of Fonda Lee’s other books any time soon.
