The Surviving Sky

Surviving Sky is a dystopian sff book with flying cities, powered by people who can reshape plants magically, and who work to keep their cities and citizens safe above a jungle-covered planet scoured and destroyed by increasingly frequent "earthrages". There's all sorts of politics, an interesting magic system that people are working to explore the edges of, and Hindu philosophy running through all of it.

One of the things that I especially like about this book is that the two main characters are a married couple in their thirties. This is not a book where two people fall in love or a typical romance genre book. I appreciate having a book focus for once on an established (and estranged at times) relationship, in a way that felt very authentic. The main source of friction in this relationship is that they are both adults with their own individual pursuits; it makes sense why they connected and supported each other in the first place, but also why these different paths, changing values, and secrets about those pursuits continue to pull them apart. Ahilya and Iravan try to make it work, and don't, and try again, and then don't, but I feel like the way the book ends feels very true to both of them.

If I had to nitpick, I feel like there's a little bit too much info dumping. The start of the book overexplained a little bit about the world, but mixed in plenty of action and politics; however, the end of the book was a whole series of explanations in a row that weren't quite delivered in a way that worked for me, even as I was intrigued by their content.

This is apparently the first book in a trilogy, which is a bit of a surprise to me. In sharing so much lore at the end of the book it felt like the world was fairly well explained and the story wrapped up with a lot of closure. I'm very curious where it will go from here.

This is a book with a lot of interesting ideas that clearly wanted to do a lot of interesting and complex things with its story. For me, it failed to ever really get me to engage. The big ideas this story wants to work with are largely explored through long detailed explanations of how it's sciencey magic system works, given by characters who are rather offputting as people, which made it hard for me to really find a foothold in the story. The two main POV characters are in a troubled marriage that they are trying and failing to work through and the number of times they fail to have an even remotely useful conversation about their relationship OR the big plot things going on got very annoying. It felt artificially drawn out and I didn't believe in their relationship or feel invested in it working out, and honestly felt like they'd both be happier going their separate ways. Overall, I don't think there was anything wrong with this book, it was just very much not for me as a reader. A plot-driven reader who loves complex science-like magic systems might find what they're looking for here.