(no subject)

[skygiants]

Fonda Lee's Untethered Sky packs a fully satisfying Young Woman Enters Intense Elite Animal Bonding Training Program story into a novella-sized package. The Animals in this novella are big rocs, which are the only things that can hunt manticores; our heroine Ester joins the roc corps as a result of a tragic manticore-related backstory, succeeds and makes personal bonds, but is then beset by both bad upper management decisions around roc deployment and the inherent emotional perils of building your entire life around a bond with a giant raptor.

I enjoyed & found plausible both the concrete details of Falconry With Extremely Big Birds -- my knowledge of falconry mostly comes from H is for Hawk and the various endnotes in Valdemar books but, you know, I have read those things and it all felt well-constructed and thought-through and interesting to me! -- and the low-key romantic plotline between two people who absolutely would never have had any kind of connection whatsoever if they were not both obsessed with Extremely Big Birds. The emotional arc, which is sad but not bleak, also hit really well for me, although that may have had something to do with the Circumstances.

On a personal note, this was the book I read the day after Her Ladyship died, which I was afraid would be an unwise choice but actually turned out to be kind of a good one -- like yes, this is a book about building your life around and loving a Creature and being terrified to lose it, and I did absolutely cry over the book in a way I probably would not have done had it not been The Time that it was.

On the other hand a.) I was going to spend that whole day intermittently sobbing no matter what so I might as well do it over a book and b.) the Creatures in Untethered Sky are huge raptors and birds of prey are not social creatures, one of the main points of the book is that you can to a certain extent domesticate them and gain their trust but they really can't and won't love you the way that you love them. So there was a level of distance there and almost a certain kind of comfort that was in a weird way pretty helpful for grieving; rip to you, Ester, but I'm different! I also loved and lost a Creature but mine did love me back!

Comments

[sovay]

I also loved and lost a Creature but mine did love me back!

*hugs*

[skygiants]

<333333333333

[chestnut_pod]

Oh yes, I wish the entire novella had been nothing but Young Woman Enters Intense Elite Animal Bonding Training Program! That was done to the highest quality, and I speak as one who has read so, so many of those.

[skygiants]

I was fresh off Terraformers too and it was just such a pleasure to read animals that felt & thought & reacted like animals rather than people in animal suits!

[pauraque]

That makes a lot of sense. I'm glad the book was some comfort to you. *hugs*

[skygiants]

thank you <333

[minutia_r]

I really liked it, but I kept expecting some twist or revelation a) about manticores, either that they weren't really beings of pure malevolence that ought to be eliminated, or that they were somehow an intentional or unintentional product of imperial expansion (or both), and b) about the prince (forget his name), that he had some sort of secret sinister agenda.

A lot of this was certainly me, going in with the wrong genre expectations. And I do like the small-scale story that it ended up being. But I also feel like there was at least a little foreshadowing that was not followed through on in proportion to the weight of the implications.

[merit]

I thought it was a well crafted book about (fantasy) birds but probably wanted something a little more... intriguing. I wasn't expecting such a straight forward adventure story with (fantasy) birds. But perhaps that my own expectations.

<333 about Creature.