Let the Sky Fall by Shannon Messenger

To say I didn’t like Let the Sky Fall, would be a giant understatement. Because, no. As of now, I’m questioning my reasons why I pushed through with finishing it. Maybe I was looking for redemption? (Heads up, I found none.)

One word. Hyphenated. The source of all bookish evil.

Insta-love. (If you head back to my Top Ten Tuesday, you’ll see that I 99.8% hate it more than peanut butter.)

Meet Vane Weston, average normal cocky teenage boy that’s definitely hornier than anyone I know. Then meet Audra Eastend, a secluded teenage girl who’s a sylph (air elementals who control the wind and are the wind; definitely not human) and Vane’s entrusted guardian. Sound familiar?

Vane was the lone survivor of a category-five tornado, leaving his parents dead and childhood memories gone. But wait, the only thing he remembers is a beautiful dark haired, dark eyed girl in the rain. Oh look, there’s more, he dreams of said beautiful, dazzling, hot girl every night for the next ten years. Ten years. Sounds even more familiar? Or ridiculous?

My mind could grasp the idea of sylphs. After all, they are mythology. But for the love of anything, the “fact” that Vane dreamt of the same girl every night – to which certain fantasies are made out of, he said so himself – is just not grounded enough to even be believed in. There’s a limit to how much one can stretch fiction and call it real.

I may have forgiven it. But then, Vane decided to make it a basis for his one true love, Audra.

Oh wait, did I spoil that for you already? Well that’s how fast everything happened.

I get that boys are boys are boys and girls are girls are girls. Nobody can help it. I definitely cannot help being so annoyed and turned off at how Vane continuously sexualizes Audra at every outfit change, at every touch, at every look. (Fun fact: this is #3 of my bookish turn-offs!)

Serious shit is going on and about to go down but he takes time to think about what he’d like to do to Audra with that jacket, with her braided hair, with her short, revealing dress, with her thin tank top. He has already established how hot she is then repeats that at every girl-noun that needs an adjective-noun. Okay, I got it. She looks real fine. His little sexual, snide comments completely ruined the pacing and the mood of every scene they are in. 

What made it worse? They’ve known each other for 4 days and he’s already professing his undying love. Dreaming about the same girl (he only has one image of her so isn’t he basically dreaming of a picture?) is not classified as knowing someone.

Now now, don’t think me sexist. Audra definitely had her issues too.

If she were human and lived human, Audra would’ve diagnosed with depression because damn girl, way to go living your life. Apparently she’s just living her duties as guardian and blaming herself for one giant mistake every step of the way for the next ten years.

Before anything else, I highly commend her for being such a strong, determined girl. Yes, she’s not human and can survive inhumanly but living the strict guardian life of food and even sleep deprivation and intense training mixed with constant hiding and watching over Vane’s happy life and placing so much guilt and expectations on herself is no easy feat, even for a sylph. 

However, she’s also got a bad habit of repetition.

I get that she’s someone deprived of love and affection for a decade (I’m being real legit about the “ten years” here) and she values every action proving how much Vanes cares.

But here’s a rundown of how it ended up being: (Keep in mind that all of Vane’s lines are the offspring of instalove. You see how it all circles back to that root of evil?)

-I’ll die for you, Audra.

-Vane cares.

-I won’t let you die, Audra.

-Vane cares.

-You’re worth more than a sacrifice to me, Audra.

-Vane cares. I love him.

Audra blames herself for the death of her father and Vane’s own parents. It is, without a doubt, a huge burden to carry but it felt more like a huge burden to read. It seemed like Shannon Messenger ran out of words to constantly describe Audra’s guilt guilt guilt. It was the same thing over and over, translating to the same feeling bombarding you as the reader again and again. At first it was sympathy until I actually wanted to be the one to slap Audra in the face and knock some good sense into her.

Her personal demons were the main focus of her character arc and it stretched on until the very last chapters, leaving most of the middle feeling a bit stagnant and slow.

Almost the entirety of the plot moved in an equally slow pace, having to switch from Vane’s POV to Audra’s. More often than not, both characters are in the same scenes together and having to change perspectives out of the blue just made the storytelling very inconsistent. The sylph world also didn’t get as much fleshing out as I expected that I ended up finding the later appearance of the Gale Force and Stormers really odd and out of place. I even had difficulty imaging what they would look like.

By the last few chapters, I was barely in it anymore. Mostly because of? Instalove.

At the end, Audra left for some reason which I only understood later on when I read the summary for the sequel. Either I wasn’t really focusing or the way it was told was just really disjointed. I mean, the first minute, she confesses her “love” to Vane then the next she’s leaving without a goodbye.

And just like Audra, I’ll rather be leaving it like that.