Title: The Air War

Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky

Series: Shadows of the Apt #8

Genre: Fantasy

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

The Overview: An empress demands her birthright . . . All is in turmoil as the world moves towards war. In Solarno, the spies watch each other and ready their knives, while Myna sees the troops muster at its border and emotions run high as it vows never to be enslaved again. In Collegium, the students argue politics, too late to turn the tide. In the heart of the Empire, new pilots have completed their secretive training, generals are being recalled to service and armies are ready to march. Their Empress, the heir to two worlds, intends to claim her birthright. And nothing—either within the Empire or beyond it—will stand in her way. A conflict is coming, the like of which the insect-kinden have never seen. –Goodreads

The Review:

After two somewhat tangent novels, it’s nice to be back with what feels like a main storyline… and the beginning of an end-of-series arc.

It has taken me a couple of years to get to this point in the series, and although many of the characters are different from where we first started, the overall atmosphere and vibes and “fix“ that I get from reading an Apt book is going strong. I love the world building and have a lot of emotional investment on seeing how the story ends.

As a sidenote, I was realizing through this book that I’m confused on what it actually means to be “Apt”. I think it’s backwards than what I thought it was.

Anyways…

I’ll admit, I could be a little more invested if we’d stayed with some of the early characters a tad longer. It’s one of those situations where a new POV is introduced every couple hundred pages, and then their stories slowly start to become more prominent. Before long, you only have a small page count dedicated to the original core cast. I tend to latch on to early characters, and by the time I figured out that I needed to pay more attention to the new POVs because they were more than just passing, it was a too late to garner investment for them. So at this point in the series, I am more reading to find out what happens to who’s left of the OG people, and a little less so to see what happens to these new people. I have only just so much capacity of shits to give.

All that said, the series has felt immersive, expansive, and wildly creative, and I cannot wait to finish things out. The next book is shaping up to be very exciting, indeed.

Recommendations: if you like the first book Empire in Black and Gold, you’re pretty much in for a solid ten book series of enjoyable stuff. Give that one a try – it was one of the strongest introductions I’ve ever read and easily one of my favorite examples of creative world building. If you’d like to taste-test the author’s fantasy works first, pick up Guns of Dawn (a standalone).

Thank you to my Patrons: Dave, Katrin, Frank, Jen, Sonja, Staci, Kat, Betsy, Eliss, Mike, Elizabeth, Bee, Tracey, Poochtee, and Kinsey! <3

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