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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Young Lit | Take Back The Skies
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Young Lit | Take Back The Skies

A young-adult novel about a runaway 14-year-old on a sky ship. If only its characters and plot were half as interesting as its premise

Take Back The Skies: By Lucy Saxon, Bloomsbury, 378 pages, `350.Premium
Take Back The Skies: By Lucy Saxon, Bloomsbury, 378 pages, `350.

Misadventures of a teen

Laying the groundwork for five young-adult fantasy sequels can make for a dreary first novel. There is a fictional world to be created from scratch, characters to be introduced and a plot line to be developed, presumably one with an interesting thread running through subsequent novels in the series as well. Lucy Saxon’s debut novel Take Back The Skies (TBTS), the first in a six-part series, certainly doesn’t hold up well under that pressure.

TBTS revolves around 14-year-old Catherine Hunter, the daughter of Nathaniel, a power-hungry government official with dreams of, what else, dominating the world. Nathaniel’s country, Anglya, has been at war with neighbouring Mericus and Siberene for years. The war effort is peopled by children over 13, because presumably the grown-ups are needed to run the country. Catherine, a “government brat", is spared the “Collections" that carry the other children to the war front. The worst she has to worry about is being married off to an odious boy from an equally influential family at some point in the future. It’s more than she can stomach, so she runs away from home—Saxon doesn’t give Catherine a meatier reason to really hate her father until much later in the book. Where does she go? She stows away on a sky ship that navigates the “storm barriers" between Anglya and other countries in Tellus—Saxon’s fantasy universe.

This, presumably, is the beginning of an exciting adventure. And it should have opened up a Tellus of possibilities for Catherine, to discover new things, people and customs. Instead, the book makes it hard to get excited about Catherine or her fortunes. At one point, she and a crew member on the sky ship discuss what to them is an ingenious new invention—don’t hold your breath, it’s just a tiny video and audio recorder. Even the big technological advancements in this world fail to amaze (to say more would be to give the plot away).

The book is positioned as futuristic, yet draws on imagery from staid technology. For example, the sky ships are built pretty much like regular sea ships with sails and masts, except that they are able to fly and are fuelled by a substance called tyrium.

The language is straightforward enough but the plot is pockmarked with so many twists and turns that it might remind readers of the once-great phone game Snake. Saxon takes a really long time to answer the question that dominates at least the first half of TBTS—what’s happening to all those child soldiers? And when she does reveal the mystery, it’s about as riveting as the audio-video recorder discovery.

A multi-series teen fantasy should at least whet the appetite for what will come next. While TBTS may not encourage readers to pick up the next installation in the series, the story of its writer might. Saxon was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome at 12 years, and went from an active, sporty lifestyle to one that involved a lot of sleeping and “watching a ridiculous amount of television". She started getting her life back together again and wrote this book at 16. Her website (www.lucysaxon.com) has oodles of something her book lacks—it is heartwarmingly honest and interesting.

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Published: 21 Oct 2014, 05:33 PM IST
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