I was a big fan of Fonda Lee’s Green Bone Saga, so when I stumbled on this novella, I was thrilled! In the sprawling Green Bone Saga, Lee crafted a dynasty in which 10s of key actors loved and hated and fought and died over several countries and thousands of pages. In The Untethered Sky, Lee narrows the scope to a single girl and her bird – well, never her bird, but the bird that she tends. I didn’t read the blurb on this book, so when it opens with Ester seeing Zahra for the first time – a fledgling taken from her rocky home to be trained to kill manticores – it took my breath away. There were many moments like this in the book: beautifully constructed, startling, scary, or devastating, though there was unevenness between those moments.
Interwoven between training montages and hunting scenes were snippets of backstory, shadings of the social and cultural milieu that Ester and her fellow ruhkers inhabit, political machinations, and glorious scenery. Lee did a lot to make this slim story – really, a kind of folk tale filled with manticores and rocs and princes with fabulous jewels – have more depth. I appreciated these touches, as they quickly located the tale in an ‘Arabian nights’ framework, so Lee didn’t have to do too much to bring me right there. She could then focus on the relationship between Ester and Zahra, and, to a lesser extent, Ester’s relationships with other ruhkers and their rocs. When the lens strayed far from Ester and Zahra, though, the story tended to lag.
I could have read many more pages about the care and use of jesses and other tools of the trade, as well as more scenes of Zahra taking off, soaring around a beautiful landscape, and then plummeting onto the head of a manticore! For me, Ester’s relationships with the other ruhkers were most interesting when they were interacting about their birds. There were some wonderful scenes of two ruhkers working together in the hunt: how do you keep your bird engaged? What happens when you don’t rustle up some prey for your bird to hunt? To me, scenes of betrayal or romance, which were slim to begin with, just didn’t have the emotional punch because we really didn’t get to know the other ruhkers well enough for me to care.
Overall, I really enjoyed The Untethered Sky and felt quite satisfied with the way it concluded. I’m looking forward to Fonda Lee’s next creation!