Skyward

Content Ratings

Mild Romance

Spensa develops a growing awareness of romantic feeling for a fellow pilot; the connection is present and emotionally genuine but handled with restraint, subordinate to the training and action narrative.

Mild Themes

The novel explores how cowardice and bravery are defined by those in power, the weight of a parent's stigmatized legacy, and the moral complexity of fighting a war whose true history has been hidden from the people doing the fighting.

Moderate Violence

Aerial combat results in the deaths of pilots including characters the reader has grown attached to; the novel does not shy from the human cost of constant war.

Synopsis

On a planet under constant attack by alien drones, sixteen-year-old Spensa dreams of becoming a pilot despite the military's ban on the daughter of a pilot labeled a coward, and her discovery of a hidden, damaged AI ship may be her only path to the sky and the truth about her father. A fast, funny, emotionally satisfying YA military science fiction novel with a strong found-family angle. The first book in the Skyward series.