Review: Sky Tribe

Sky Tribe by Sabrina Chase
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A long-awaited third installment in the series. I looked back at my review for the previous book, which said that I'd struggled to remember the first book while reading the second, so I re-read from the beginning of the series. I was glad I did; this one does have a bit more "previously-on", but it was worth refreshing my memory of the characters.

Having said that, this third book sidelines the central characters of the first two books, doesn't give much more development to the rising secondary characters from the second book (Marcus and Fraulein von Kitren), and focuses on a couple of minor characters from Book 2 along with a new main character we haven't seen before, the intrepid young woman shown on the cover. She's a housemaid, but her background is that she's been trained in acrobatics by the Zigane (Roma) troupe that her mother joined when she was a small child. She's blonde in the book, if I remember correctly, but dark-haired on the cover.

The first two books featured very low-key romances as subsidiary plots, and I thought this one might as well, but the incipient romance remains so incipient I thought it wasn't intended to be one at all right until the end. A character in the epilogue declares it a romance (that the participants weren't even aware of yet) more or less by fiat. A couple of early references suggest that the female lead is attractive, but the male lead's viewpoint doesn't ever seem to acknowledge this. So that was a bit of a fizzle.

There's plenty of adventure, as in the previous books, but the stakes felt lower. I think this is because, while the viewpoint characters' actions do have the potential to affect the peace and security of the whole of alternate-world Europe, they're mostly unaware of this. They have personal stakes of survival and being able to fulfil obligations, but that doesn't drive as desperate a plot as in the previous two books in the series. They're also not powerful mages, like the female lead of books 1 and 2, so the set-pieces are not as over-the-top dramatic.

Besides the non-event romance and the lower stakes, the other thing that disappointed me was that the copy editing was at a lower standard than the previous books, with quite a few minor errors, at least three of which should have been caught by spellcheck.

I still enjoyed it, it still retains four stars, and I'd still read more books in the series, but for me, this didn't come up to the standard of the previous two. It does still make it to my Best of the Year list, though.

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