Skyfarer
The Drifting Lands series, Book 1
Joseph Brassey
Angry Robot
Fiction, Fantasy
Themes: Airborn Adventures, Diversity, Girl Power, Magic Workers
**
Description
The day she left the Academy of Mystic Sciences and set foot upon the skycraft Elysium was the day Aimee de Laurent's life would truly begin. After
a childhood of stifling aristocratic education and years studying magic, she leapt at the apprenticeship offer from her former teacher Harkon Bright, a chance
to use her portal magic and to explore the countless floating realms of the Drifting Lands. This is the freedom she's been dreaming of her whole life. But the
first portal she opens is almost her last, when a misfiring spell sends them into the middle of a firefight with the notorious knights of the Eternal
Order.
The black-clad knight Lord Azrael has plundered, torched, and murdered his way across a broad swath of the Drifting Lands in service to the Eternal Order. Now
his master, Lord Roland, has sent him to the small kingdom of Port Providence in search of an ancient artifact: the Axiom Diamond, hidden away for centuries,
which - it is said - will reveal truths and treasures to any who possess it. It seemed a simple enough task... but something about this mission has been
bothering him, some nagging hint of a deeper destiny, and memories of an impossible past.
Review
It looked like a quick, fun fantasy adventure, set in a world of skyships and floating islands and wonder. Of that list of possibilities, "quick" is about
the only adjective that actually came to pass.
Brassey takes what could have - and should have - been a thrilling setup and overloads it with genre cliches, tiresome characters, clunky worldbuilding, and
writing that, frankly, had me grinding my teeth more often than not, with overused descriptors and improbable dialog tags. (How does one nod dialog? Snarling
and sneering words is hard enough, but nodding them? And if I'm to the point of nitpicking said-bookisms, I am not properly immersed in the story.) Fresh young
mage Aimee is the blonde and blue-eyed Mary Sue, her mentor Harkon is one step (at most) removed from Obi-Wan Kenobi in many respects, the crew of the
Elysium is straight out of the stock bin of "eccentric yet reliable ship crew," Lord Azrael is a mashup of anime-inspired angsty villains and Darth
Vader, the bad guys are so over-the-top evil they're almost hilarious... and that's not even touching the Highlander-level beheadings. I quickly lost
track of how many people, extras and otherwise, who were beheaded or bodily bisected (always effortlessly) by the Eternal Order knights; there are other ways
to kill people with a sword, believe it or not, and it quickly lost its shock value to become somewhat boring wallpaper. Not a single element in this book could
not be obviously traced to another book, series, or franchise, to the point where I started to wonder if it was intentional homage or if Brassey simply hadn't
read enough of the genre to realize how derivative it appeared, how overused the ideas and "twists." The whole comes together like one of those B-grade
knock-offs of Star Wars or Final Fantasy, with the serial numbers hardly even scratched off. The action even plays out like it wants to be
filmed (or animated), not written, full of flashy shows of power and Jedi-esque maneuvers (sans light sabers, though there is an enchanted sword that's fairly
similar.)
Skyfarer reads fast, and now and again it tries to rise above its overbaked elements, but just can't get airborne and winds up plummeting into the
abyss.