Our score
Excellent
Blightfall
Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson
Blightfall opens the Riftwake trilogy and hands the Skyward universe to Arturo Mendez and Sadie Kauffman, sending Skyward Flight on a routine diplomatic escort that strands them on a forest-swallowed planet nobody has heard from in decades. Janci Patterson, writing with Brandon Sanderson, delivers sharp dogfights, a genuinely strange world, and teleporting slugs who get chapters of their own.
From the review
Faster-than-light travel in this universe runs on slugs. Not engines, not exotic drives: small, hungry, relentlessly affectionate creatures called taynix, who teleport by instinct and have to be talked into doing it on cue. So when Skyward Flight escorts a diplomatic team to a world sealed behind a belt of debris, and something down there starts cutting the pilots off from their slugs, they don't lose a convenience. They lose the road home. The book builds its entire middle out of that one hard rule, and it's the best thing in it. The mission was supposed to be dull. The long war is over, humanity is free, and Arturo Mendez draws the postwar assignment nobody expects to need: fly cover for diplomats making contact with a human settlement that never learned the fighting stopped. Arturo is exactly the wrong person to hand an easy job. He spent years as second to a legend, he's the one everyone looks at now, and Patterson keeps circling the specific dread inside that. Not fear of dying. Fear of being the one whose call gets somebody else killed. Sadie carries the other half of the book, younger and louder and far better company than her earlier appearances ever suggested.
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