The Sky Blues- Review & Thoughts
5/5 stars
⅖ peppers
"The blues are bluer up here, after all"
The Sky Blues is a novel about a LGBTQ teen finding his place in a small town. The book is well-crafted and creates vivid images and emotions for the reader. The Sky Blues deserves every bit of the five stars I'm giving it and more.
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Sky Baker may be openly gay, but in his small, insular town, making sure he was invisible has always been easier than being himself. Determined not to let anything ruin his senior year, Sky decides to make a splash at his high school’s annual beach bum party by asking his crush, Ali, to prom—and he has thirty days to do it.
What better way to start living loud and proud than by pulling off the gayest promposal Rock Ledge, Michigan, has ever seen?
Then, Sky’s plans are leaked by an anonymous hacker in a deeply homophobic e-blast that quickly goes viral. He’s fully prepared to drop out and skip town altogether—until his classmates give him a reason to fight back by turning his thirty-day promposal countdown into a school-wide hunt to expose the e-blast perpetrator.
But what happens at the end of the thirty days? Will Sky get to keep his hard-won visibility? Or will his small-town blues stop him from being his true self?
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I fell in love with sky and his friends! The characters had realistic depth and experiences. Like most of the books I read, the characters were in their teen years, 17 or 18. Even the minor characters had depth and an important role in the story. Personally for me, Sky was really relatable, and his actions and thoughts didn't get repetitive like other books I've read. Adding to this, his interactions with other characters and other characters' interactions with him were always interesting and important to the plot.
With contemporary fiction there isn't as much world-building as there would be in a fantasy novel series but the author still has to build the characters' life up for the readers to understand. Sky and all the side characters had a detailed and realistic life. The reader understood and related to the character's life which means the world building was successful. Another part that I really liked about the world-building was it was well paced so they didn't have like a whole bunch of information just being dumped on you or too little information where you feel like you don't even know the character.
There are very commonly used tropes (a significant or recurrent theme; a motif.) in LGTBQ books such as coming out stories. These are great but they can get old. Robbie Couch blew my mind with this book. I've never heard of nor read a book with this plot, much less in LGBTQ book. The plot was very unique and easy to understand while also creating questions in my mind. It was well written and executed beautifully.
Robbie Couch is an amazing author and I'm so glad I picked up his debut novel. The Sky Blues made me smile, cry and angry air punch all over the place. I didn't want it to end! Definitely putting this one on my favorites shelf.
If you loved, Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda and What If Its Us read this!!!