With no warning, this fat, self-loathing princess is married off to a distant king and is embroiled in political and spiritual intrigue. She's a devout reader of holy books and is well-versed in the military strategy text Belleza Guerra, but she has been kept in ignorance of world affairs. More terrific combat scenes, but a bit too heavy on character development to fly at speed.Īdventure drags our heroine all over the map of fantasyland while giving her the opportunity to use her smarts.Įlisa-Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle-has been chosen for Service since the day she was born, when a beam of holy light put a Godstone in her navel. Wild diversity of intergalactic body types notwithstanding, human members seem uniformly White.

Now for those overlords….McSweeney contributes a map, lovingly detailed sets of spaceship plans, and galleries of the multispecies cast members. A few wild aerial dogfights and larger battles later, however, Spensa has come into her cytonic superpowers, found out some crucial things about the delvers, and made her way back to the somewhere. Fun as all the space-opera elements are, though, they continue a trend from the preceding volume in deadening the efforts of Spensa and sidekicks old and new to establish personal identities or backstories, wrestle with inner demons, or, in the case of the AI M-Bot, practice insults and deal with newly discovered emotions. Leaving her ongoing feud with evil galactic overlords on temporary hold back in the somewhere, Spensa passes through a portal to a realm where time and memories tend to slip away, bits of landscape randomly snipped from reality float like islands around a distant sunburst-and teeming hordes of disembodied, malevolent entities called delvers are relentlessly hunting her down. The third episode in the Skyward series sees red-hot space pilot Spensa Nightshade coming into her full powers as she battles both pirates and space monsters in a strange interdimensional nowhere.

Cytonic book