Hello and welcome to another review in Vesna’s section of The Swordsmith book blog. Today the book of choice is Skylark in the Fog, a sci-fi novel by Helyna L. Clove. I saw the premise of the book on Twitter and it really intrigued me so I filled out a form for an ARC. Luckily I was approved and received a digital copy from the author.
The premise
So when the universe falls to pieces, it doesn’t mean your life has to, right? That comes later.
Jeane Blake, captain of the spaceship Skylark, makes her living by looting dead worlds, planets fallen prey to naturally occurring wormhole-like rifts plaguing the cosmos. She survives the only way she knows how: avoiding commitment and arguing with her dead foster father’s ghost. But when her crew stumbles upon an alien device that could collapse the wormhole network and wipe out all sentient life, they catch the hungry eyes of the Union, a tyrannical empire hunting the sinister tech.
As she flees the Union’s brainwashed agents, Jeane is forced to take on a shady mission and gets stuck assisting the runaway monarch of a technocrat planet. Queen Maura Tholis is seeking the aid of an interstellar resistance to reclaim her war-torn world, with another trouble-magnet device as her bargaining chip: a glove that allows her to command AI systems. Jeane couldn’t care less about the whole deal, but things become personal when the Union annexes the place she calls home. And it might be her fault.
Reluctant to become weapons in the hands of power-hungry militants and desperate rebels, smuggler and queen join forces. But to save their homes, they must redefine themselves, work with the enemy, and face personal traumas they’d buried long ago—and only stars know which challenge might break them in the end.
The review
I have to say I was really excited to read this book because the premise promised everything I love in sci fi novel: interesting characters, deep space missions, battles and a bit of politics on top of it all.
Truthfully, the book was quite confusing for me at the beginning, since there are a lot of characters and a lot of places in space (outposts, planets, ships…), so I naturally thought the novel would be hard to follow. But it turns out all of those things made me like the book and it made it special.
Once I got the hang of the characters and who everyone is I really started to like all of them. They all had quite a personality with all the quirks that go along and were really well developed, so I felt like I began to know all of them. I could easily connect with many of them, even with some that were actually not human (aliens, AI), but still felt human in a certain way.
Like I mentioned before, there were also many places that the novel takes place in and it wasn’t confusing at all. All the places were well developed and filled with interesting facts, rich histories, and most of the places were somehow connected to certain characters in the book, so they all felt in place and well incorporated into the plot of the story.
The story itself, when it comes to plot, is quite rich and action packed and even though it’s quite a long book, I never felt it’s stretched out with unnecessary data and events. Everything was in the place and plotted out nicely.
I have to say, I really enjoyed reading Skylark in the Fog and I think it’s a great book for any sci-fi reader who loves deep space adventures that are filled with action.
The Swordsmith 