Sunday, April 19, 2015

Earth & Sky Review: Skylar

I've been noticing things.
The wrongness of things.
Like they shouldn't exist that way.

Turns out I was right.
Those things aren't right.
Earth is just a playground.

Everything is being manipulated.
The fabric of the Earth is being played with.
And now, it's starting to unravel.

I'm the only one aware of this.
I will help set things right.

My name is Skylar.
Hi guys! Today, I'm Skylar, from Earth & Sky.

Book: Earth & Sky
Author: Megan Crewe
Series: Earth & Sky
Standing: Book 1
Setting: hard to pinpoint, because there's a lot of time travelling. But Skylar lives in modern day Earth. I wasn't really paying attention where she lived, but it's somewhere close to Miami
POV: first person, by Skylar herself
Genre: YA sci-fi

Reading: first time
Favorite line: "I am not a shadow; I'm a human being who's spent the last two days fighting to liberate my planet, and I am not letting it end like this."
Rating: 3 stars


Definitely an interesting book, with a neat concept of time. Yes, there's time travel. Not to use a bad pun, but the past holds the key to the future, after all. I had a few slight issues the concept of time travelling in this book, though it's mainly because the ideas in it sort of bashes heads with other concepts on time travel in other books. But overall, it's neat.

Skylar is a human with a heightened sense of awareness. She notices things, or even people, that don't quite belong, and when she does, her mind screams wrong! WRONG! It can be a little overwhelming at times, and she's always having to calm herself down before it escalates into a panic attack. The motif of three comes up a lot, mainly because Skylar uses it to calm down the sense of wrongness she keeps on feeling. What do I mean by that, you ask? Well, during a wrongness attack, she focuses on multiplying things by three. Example: three times three is nine. Three times nine is twenty-seven. Three times twenty-seven is eighty-one. Three times eight-one is...

Math geek? Maybe. But keep in mind that three happens to be the number of perfection, so it fits relativity in opposition to wrongness. What better way to combat wrongness with perfection?

I wasn't totally sure about how the time-travelling aspect worked. It was explained, but I felt like there were a few gaps that made it a little hard to follow. It's more restricted than you'd think it would be. But what I did like about it was the idea of being "doxed" (short for "paradoxed"). Basically, it's a physical restraint that prohibits someone from meeting themselves in another timeline, like meeting your past self. But where it gets confusing is that it also prohibits someone from meeting someone from the same timeline the time traveler came from. As in, say my friend went back 20 years, and then I decide to go back 20 years too. If we get too close to each other, one of us get doxed, because our time "bubbles" bump into each other. A little confusing.

What I did like was the idea of having your time jumps being tracked. Skylar and her companion, Win, are also running from the Enforcers, who are sort of like the police. Meaning they're being chased, not just through place, but also time. That being said, not once do they go back to the time before the Enforcers caught up with them...

The one main issue I had with Skylar was her dependence on Win. Yes, he's the one who can operate the time-travelling machine, but by doing so, Skylar is completely helpless without him. As in, she can't get home, can't escape the Enforcers if she's found alone, etc. I guess that's a risk she had to take when she time jumped with him, but I don't quite like it.

But the idea of human history being controlled and manipulated is very neat. Human life only being an experiment...yikes. Because if human history is in fact being conditioned, well, things just got a lot creepier here on Earth...

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