Book Review – The Other Side of the Sky

The Other Side of the Sky is written by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner and published last year. They describe it on their personal websites as:

A genre-bending romance where The 100 meets a Miyazaki-inspired fantasy world, in which the prince of a hi-tech city in the sky falls into a goddess’s ancient land ruled by magicians and prophecy.

Plot:

One world is a floating island high about the planet’s surface. Citizens of this world are inundated with intricate and sophisticated technology. They’ve come to rely on it for their every need, but there is a problem: no one knows how it works. That knowledge has been lost to time. Prince North urges the government to take action to rectify this dramatic problem, sighting the island’s exponentially decreasing altitude, but no one will listen.

The other world, on the planet’s surface, is full of superstitious and magic-practicing people slavishly devoted to their leader and living goddess, Nimh. Dangerous mists have been appearing without warning, causing madness and severe sickness in all who are trapped within. Nimh follows a vision she received of an additional stanza to the old prophecy. If it’s true, she may save her world yet.

The two protagonists from different worlds meet, by fate or coincidence they cannot say. They learn each other’s ways and aid in solving two problems made one.

Review – TL;DR:

Do you hate cliches for their own sakes? If you do, this book will not be for you, it’s rife with them. If not, this book has solid character development, polished prose, and 2 distinct narrative voices to pull you through a well-crafted plot. Nothing earth-shattering, but a solid manuscript you won’t feel disappointed for reading.

Review – Spoiler Free:

The dividing line for this book will CERTAINLY come down to its reliance on cliches. By the start of chapter 2, I could quite accurately predict all major plot points as well as several character developments. It does nothing new. We’ve all seen tech-savvy characters who deny magic is real even while it’s happening in front of their face. We’ve all seen a young female protagonist who is late to manifest some aspect of her personality which she was promised and is overwrought with crippling self-doubt as a result. We’ve seen stubborn politicians and religious zealots too prideful to admit fault even as it causes the worlds they love to collapse. If you are looking for something unpredictable and unique, go elsewhere. However, this book’s use of cliches actually WAS its selling point for me. But to explain why I need to discuss programming. Don’t worry, I’ll keep it simple.

After developers write whatever program or scripts, they usually have to run it through a number of checks.

• First, there is the validator. Think of this as the spell check for a document: only concerned with spelling and misplaced punctuation. “Is this a valid sentence? Does it start with capitalization? Does it contain and subject and verb? Does it end with a period?”

• Next is usually a style guide check. This applies extra rules, not because it’s right or would be wrong to do otherwise, but for the sake of consistency. For example, your main protagonist may be named Zoey. You could have also named her Zoe or Zoie. These are all valid spellings, but you settled on Zoey–with a ‘y’. So every time you mention her by name, a ‘y’ should be included.

• Finally, at least at the last two places I’ve worked, there is something called a Code Sniffer. It contains a small list of common pitfalls programmers can fall into which can make their code less readable or reusable. The idea being, whatever this check looks for, it doesn’t mean the code is bad. It doesn’t even mean there is a better way to write it, that might be the best possible way to write it. But it often isn’t. And, more importantly, it often is accompanied by other problems elsewhere and often will cause more problems down the road. A failed code sniff doesn’t mean what we wrote stinks, but it does mean someone caught an unpleasant whiff along the way.
  

To bring this bad around to the subject at hand, cliches are (in my honest judgment) akin to the third check. A book “smell”, if you will. Cliches themselves aren’t bad, but they are often accompanied by other problems. Think back to the worst book you ever read. 2-Dimensional characters, stilted dialog, meandering or nonsensical plot. Etc. Now, how many cliches did it use? I’d bet money quite a few. Those are problems that will cause me to drop a book mere sentences in. And they are always so entwined with an overreliance on cliche that the former gives the latter a bad name. Why? Because cliches are so prevalent that they are always the first thing we think of. If I were a hack writer wanting to do as little work as humanly possible to become a published author, I’m not going to be stopping and asking myself if the first thing off the top of my head is good enough. Hence, cliches will be the majority of my story.

Okay, back to the book. When I read the first couple of chapters, my mental sniffer was pinging. I saw the number of cliches used in such a short period of time and prepared for the worst. However, what was not there were the other issues that often accompany cliches. 2-Dimensional characters? No. North is not just a rebellious teen. He’s actively concerned about the state of the Kingdom that he will eventually inherit and fights for its sake. When his initial plan fails, he expresses regret with his decisions while acknowledging the good that came from it, and he pushes forward every step of the way. Nimh isn’t just a whiney protagonist who lets the plot happen to her, she actively seeks it out even while she doubts herself and her abilities. They lie to each other, withhold information, forget to mention vital things to each other because they didn’t seem relevant. Their character growth is believably slow and organic and could not have happened without each other. Stilted dialog? Far from it. I’d argue this is the strongest aspect of the book. Nimh and North are written by separate authors, which is extremely effective in developing unique voices for each character (made even better with separate readers in the audiobook). These narrative voices are then carried into the dialog between the two protagonists which make up the majority of the story. I can tell that this was where the authors placed the majority of the focus. The differing voices are polished to a shine. Meandering or nonsensical plot? Definitely not. I’ve already mentioned above, it wasn’t a surprising plot, but it is solid. The pacing is excellent. New information is dulled out in every chapter. And it all builds on one another, adding weight and urgency to the goal. Resulting in a final confrontation that feels inevitable.

At my job, if we fail a code sniff, we have the opportunity to defend it in front of our peers. It might be necessary or be the best way to write our code. And I feel that is exactly the case here. The best way to write this story was to lean into the cliches and polish out every other imperfection. Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner did precisely that. It’s not a must-read, but because it so cleanly demonstrates the distinction between cliches and bad writing, I have no problems calling it a should-read.

Review – SPOILERS:

I have no idea how necessary this section is for this review. Almost everything I wanted to say is in the spoiler-free section.

The one topic worth noting here, where no one can complain about soft spoilers, is that The Other Side of the Sky is the first half of a duology. The sequel, Beyond the End of the World, immediately follows up on this book and finished the story that is left incomplete here. This is a personal pet peeve of mine. Every book should be capable of standing on its own merits, and they do not even attempt that here. They promised a “there and back again” sort of adventure then only give the readers the “there”.

When I said at the beginning of the review that I could accurately predict all the major plot points, I got a two-for-one deal. I can guess what happens in the second book without ever picking it up. I probably will at some point, but I’m going to wait until it’s good and on sale out of principal for cutting a story in half just to earn a few extra dollars.