‘The Queen of Nothing’ by Holly Black delivers a satisfying ending to a beloved series.

In fact, this is the second year in a row that Black has snagged the top prize in this category, the second book in the series, The Wicked King, winning 2019’s award. This is the third book in the Folk of the Air series, which kicked off with The Cruel Prince in 2018. Holly Black’s The Queen of Nothing also earned the number one pick in the Best Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction category. Acevedo’s “a novel-in-verse” explores themes of grief and family, following the lives of Camino and Yahaira Rios who discover each other after their father dies in a plane crash. In the Young Adult category, the top winner was Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo. As with every year, readers on the bookish social media website voted for the top books across numerous categories - including two in YA. Also, I just missed a lot of the characters from Skyward.Īll in all this was an interesting sequel and I look forward to discovering where Sanderson takes this series next.The 2020 Goodreads Choice Awards have drawn to a close. At times Starsight was repetitive and confusing. While I recognise that Skyward‘s plot was much more ‘simple’, part of me preferred that. This being a novel by Sanderson, there is quite a lot of humour. Spensa finds herself engaged in numerous battles. In many ways this is a military soap-opera. She’s still unsure of her cytonic powers and of what they make her. While in Skyward Spensa struggled with notions of ‘cowardice’, in this volume she doesn’t really have a lot of spare time to herself.

Spensa is as hot-tempered as ever, and once again finds herself getting into trouble thanks to her ‘act first, think later’ attitude. Sanderson’s aliens very much reminded me of Becky Chambers’ ones in Wayfarers, or even Mass Effect, in that we are given a lot of information regarding the way the look, behave, express themselves, reproduce themselves, communicate with others, their role in their society. Brandon Sanderson’s intricate world-building is populated by many interesting, and richly rendered, alien species.

Whereas Skyward had a narrower scope, Starsight presents us with a far more complex story in which the stakes are higher then ever. This instalment is perhaps even more action-driven than Skyward: from the opening chapters to its explosive finale, Starsight is full of spectacular fight scenes. Starsight takes this series in an unexpected direction.

Starsight goodreads