Sunreach (Skyward Flight: Novella 1)
By: Janci Patterson and Brandon Sanderson
My Rating: Four out of five stars
Best for: 12 and up

A novella? Ya right…

Seriously, every time Brandon Sanderson writes a book that’s under 250 pages and calls it a “novella” I laugh out loud. It’s like he just wants to remind the other authors that he’s their daddy and it’s cute how they write a 200-page books and call them novels.

This time it’s a little different though because it’s perfectly clear: Brandon Sanderson did not write this book.

If I had to guess, this is how it went down: Brandon gave his friend Janci (who does great work, btw) a file with a rough outline of a story and instructions to write a book for him. The only specifics in the file were the goals the book needed to achieve to advance the bigger Skyward story arc, the names and general descriptions of the the characters, a general road map of how to get from start to finish, and a detailed description of how the climax of the story should go down. I think Brandon gave her that file and set her loose.

This wasn’t a bad book at all, but it definitely wasn’t a Brandon Sanderson book. Read it and see if you agree.

Now that you know what to expect, maybe you’ll be free from the disappointment I felt as I slowly realized how un-Sanderson the writing was–which (kind of) unfairly made me not love the book as much. Because it’s not bad…it’s just a more saccharine and juvenile than I expected.

It does do a great job of advancing the Skyward story. I’m looking forward to the other Skyward Flight “Novellas” that will pave the way for Cytonic, Skyward 3, which comes out in a couple months.

No content concerns, but obviously as a stop gap between books of a larger series, it’s only going to have interest to folks who have already read Skyward books 1 and 2.

Get your copy here!

Happy reading!