SFINCS3 Round 1 Review: Skyfold by T. J. McKay

This year, I am taking part in the SFINCS3 contest as a judge on the TBR team. Round 1 has just begun, and our team will choose 5 novellas from our batch of 20 to go through to the semifinals by 20th December. Every book will be read and scored out of 10 by at least two people. At this stage, we are not obliged to review, but I will try and review as many as I can on here. My reviews are my own opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of my team.

The first novella I chose to read and review is Skyfold by T. J. McKay.

My Review of Skyfold by T. J. McKay

Skyfold is a tale of treachery set in a fantasy world of rain-soaked floating islands, with a human maiden sacrificed to godlike Sovereigns every year. Meteor showers rain down occasionally, and magic is wielded by the enormous, faceless, winged Sovereigns to keep the humans in line. 

In this novella, a friend turns traitor during a heist with tragic effect. His envy of his foster brother’s wealth and lifestyle leads to a despicable act.

Set in an imaginative world, I felt that the worldbuilding really suffered from the short length of this novella and deserved a lot more description, since it seemed so unique. The location was intriguing, but I found it hard to visualise without more information. The antagonists, the Sovereigns, were also difficult to picture. Were they armoured dragons or large bipedal winged humanoids? I may have missed this detail, as I felt like a lot of information was being thrown at me at the beginning of the story without there being enough time for any of it to take hold. 

The use of multiple terms in the native language was a little jarring for me. Yes, a glossary was provided at the beginning, but I find leaving the story to go and look something up always ruins the flow of a story. I usually try to grasp meaning from context rather than looking up words, but these were at times confusing to me.

The emotions and feeling of peril could have been heightened during the action sequences. Cabbott and Riven were undertaking brave feats of climbing, using their rugal spikes to scale Sovereign metal walls, with a huge drop beneath them into an abyss and yet I didn’t feel fearful for them, perhaps because they were confident of their success and maybe also because these sequences happened very quickly when they could have been drawn out further and made more of in a longer novel. 

I love a heist story and enjoyed that part of the story immensely. I also really liked Riven’s curse and how it manifested itself. Her ending was somewhat confusing and felt a little “tacked on”, as if it were simply there to introduce an important player in a coming series.

I think this would have been a really amazing story if given more space to explore the world and its history in greater depth. I really hope this is a prequel novella and that there will be more stories set in this unique world! If there are, count me in.