Skylark in the Fog was the 9th place finalist in BBNYA 2024!
About BBNYA
BBNYA is a yearly competition where book bloggers from all over the world read and score books written by indie authors, ending with 15 finalists (16 in 2024) and one overall winner.
If you want some more information about BBNYA, check out the BBNYA Website https://www.bbnya.com/ or take a peek over on Twitter @BBNYA_Official. BBNYA is brought to you in association with the book blogger support group @The_WriteReads.
So when the universe falls to pieces, it doesn’t mean your life has to, right? That comes later.
Jeane Blake, captain of the spaceship Skylark, makes her living by looting dead worlds, planets fallen prey to naturally occurring wormhole-like rifts plaguing the cosmos. She survives the only way she knows how: avoiding commitment and arguing with her dead foster father’s ghost. But when her crew stumbles upon an alien device that could collapse the wormhole network and wipe out all sentient life, they catch the hungry eyes of the Union, a tyrannical empire hunting the sinister tech.
As she flees the Union’s brainwashed agents, Jeane is forced to take on a shady mission and gets stuck assisting the runaway monarch of a technocrat planet. Queen Maura Tholis is seeking the aid of an interstellar resistance to reclaim her war-torn world, with another trouble-magnet device as her bargaining chip: a glove that allows her to command AI systems. Jeane couldn’t care less about the whole deal, but things become personal when the Union annexes the place she calls home. And it might be her fault.
Reluctant to become weapons in the hands of power-hungry militants and desperate rebels, smuggler and queen join forces. But to save their homes, they must redefine themselves, work with the enemy, and face personal traumas they’d buried long ago-and only stars know which challenge might break them in the end.
Helyna L. Clove (she/they) is a lover of the written word, hot comfort drinks, a universe full of stars, and all things neat and kind. She was born in 1988 in Hungary, and was raised in a small village a few miles off the shores of Lake Balaton. Described as someone always having “her head in the clouds”, she spent the first fifteen years of her life mostly consuming books from her dad’s home library, watching some great 90’s sci-fi series and movies, slowly working on her eclectic music taste, and dreaming about being abducted by cool alien friends.
After the arduous years of acquiring her astrophysics degree (because if they were not coming for her, she would damn well at least try and spy on those aliens) she worked as a researcher in Budapest, moving onto the green pastures of South-France in 2018, then Wales in 2022, where she currently lives with her small family of a wonderful boyfriend and Puddle, the tortoiseshell cat. She spends most of her time commandeering telescopes, staring at molecular spectra, writing/reading, cooking, playing video games, and trying her hand at different crafts.
Although she has been, as the Hungarians say, writing to her desk drawer since she was a kindergartener, it wasn’t until 2019 that she stepped out into the world with her stories. In the hell-year of 2020 she finished her first full-length novel, Skylark in the Fog, a light-hearted but honest space opera featuring a grumpy spaceship captain and her wayward friends on a quest to find their metaphorical (and maybe literal) homes, and, if everything goes well which it rarely does, to save the universe as well.
Her current projects include Imbued and Untwined, a new adult/adult dark fantasy duology about magic and love and how those might break the world, a paranormal horror about a team of demonhunters, several other speculative story ideas, and the so-far-untitled sequel to the adventures of the Skylark-crew.
My thoughts: I loved this, it’s exactly the kind of sci-fi I enjoy, a crew of misfits, an impossible mission, chaos, adventure, secrets, overthrowing the evil empire. And it was just lots of fun. Jeane was my favourite, after ALU, that little tin can with its mysterious origin, love of helping and strong bonds of friendship, too cute.
Although if I’m really honest, I loved the whole gang – not a duff character among them. And poor Skylark, definitely here for Skylark 2: Taping the ship back together.
Jeane takes on a quick pick up job for an old friend, while avoiding the Union (evil empire) who are hunting their ship, because of the super secret alien tech they previously collected. Then they get involved in about three wars all at once. Everyone is forced to reckon with their families and upbringing, Jeane almost dies inside an AI system, the evil empire keeps trying to kill everyone, some stuff explodes, some people die (boo!) and then the gang goes their separate ways…which I did not like.
I really hope when book 2 arrives, my new pals are reunited, the evil empire is less evil and Jeane gets to smile occasionally, even though her permanently grumpy mood is very funny. Look, I loved this, it filled a sci-fi hole that I didn’t know I had.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 