"Skyward" by Brandon Sanderson

Finally, actually villainous aliens! Ones that aren't a heavy-handed metaphor for colonialism! I rejoice!

The protagonist of this book somewhat reminded me of the protagonist of Apprentice, in that they're both perpetually angry teenage girls with slightly strange names. However, I liked Spensa from Skyward much better than Kerr from Apprentice, because A) Spensa is rather smarter, and B) Skyward's setting, not being a dystopia where you can get imprisoned for snapping at the wrong person, is more suited to this sort of character.

Spensa also has habit of making hilariously over-the-top threats whenever she wants to yell at someone, which I found amusing.

I really liked that this flips a lot of the standard tropes on their heads. For one thing, we have the actually villainous aliens. There are other examples, albeit ones that require major spoilers:

The |"clearing your family's name"| trope. |Spensa's dead father was branded as a coward for running away during the initial battle against the aliens, and Spensa spends much of the book trying to prove that he wasn't a coward. And she does discover evidence that he wasn't a coward, but unfortunately that comes in the form of evidence that instead of running away, he turned traitor, fired on his own allies, and had to be shot down. Later evidence proves that he did this because he was (sort of) mind-controlled by the aliens, but it's still a nice subversion.|

The |"person in authority who hates you for no reason"| trope. |There's an admiral who is seemingly dead set against letting Spensa achieve her dream of being a space fighter pilot and fighting the aliens. As it happens, this is because she's pretty sure that Spensa inherited from her dad the trait that lets you be mind-controlled by the aliens, and she really doesn't want a repeat of the "pilot goes insane and shoots down three of his comrades before being shot down himself" incident.|

Brandon Sanderson does not hesitate to |kill characters off| in this book. It pretty effectively hammers home the |"these aliens are dangerous and we're on the back foot fighting them"| aspect of the story.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for sci-fi violence. No actual swearing, though there is repeated and vehement swearing with made-up swear words (the best kind of swear words).

4 stars.

(Endnote: Now is the time for all good men (and women) to get in a spaceship and fight some aliens.)