I was interested in this title based on how much I liked Whiteley's The Beauty. By the time I finished this book, I could recognize it as the same author, but it was such a slow burn that I had a hard time staying with it.

An interesting sci-fi novel about the aftermath of conflict, and the stories of those from opposing sides.
Lovely use of imagination and characterisation that builds a world beautifully even in a shorter text.

I really wanted this book to be for me and I persevered but it just didn't click.

It was very slow paced and I'd read review where it said to stick with it but it just didn't materialise for me. It was also a little confusing as to where exactly they were to begin with, maybe just me.

Thank you for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Recently, during a blogging meme, the question came up of which authors we wished were more well-known. The question kept echoing around my mind, even as I picked up my third book by Aliya Whiteley, Skyward Inn. As I started reading I realized that Whiteley is probably the author I am most excited to recommend. There is something about her speculative science fiction that blows my mind each time and I wish more readers had that experience! Thankfully I have this bookblog to direct my raving at, but I am now also armed with physical copies of Whiteley's books to emphasize my point offline as well. Thanks to Solaris and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I first encountered Aliya Whiteley through her novella The Beauty, published in 2014 by Unsung Stories. It was a fascinating discussion and dissection of gender roles through the Weird and Speculative, during which Whiteley almost lulls you into a sense of security until she rips away the comfort blanket and confronts you with the darkness. I then read The Arrival of Missives in 2016, also published by Unsung Stories. Entering solidly into Speculative territory, The Arrival of Missives shows us a society uncannily like our own and yet fundamentally different in ways that are hard to pinpoint. Addressing the odd moment of freedom for women shortly during and after World War I, it is a novel of awakening and questioning, one that is intently concerned with belonging and identity as well. Since then I managed to miss Whiteley's subsequent works, but I wanted to revisit these two to show the themes and threads that run through Whiteley's work. There is a consistent questioning of gender, of society, of the dangers and benefits of conforming, and a consistent gaze upwards at the stars. Her writing is through provoking and often becomes a conversation starter for me. Skyward Inn follows in the tradition of her other work perfectly in that it isn't letting me go.

Jem, human, and Isley, Qita, run the Skyward Inn in the Western Protectorate, a part of England that has closed itself off from the rest of Earth in a rejection of humanity attempting to colonize Qita. It is a quiet life, but one that can be fulfilling. But then visitors arrive from outside the Protectorate and things begin to change. Perhaps the Protectorate isn't as closed off as it thought. And perhaps humanity's "war" with the Qita wasn't won as painlessly as they have assumed. Jem is the protagonist for most of the novel, but there are also chapters dedicated to her son, Fosse, who lives with her brother, the leader of the Protectorate. Jem has been to Qita, has experienced the world outside, but Fosse is still young and a bit lost. I don't want to give anything about the plot away, since every reader should get to explore its smooth twists for itself. What I will say is that by the end of the novel all the topics that were promised, belonging, identity, and regret, had come to the surface and I was pondering on each. Skyward Inn is a beautiful story, with stunning imagery and big questions which never feel forced but always come naturally.

I think it has become clear I'm rather a big fan of Aliya Whiteley's writing. She manages to make something stunning out of everything she describes. I featured the first line in a post recently, and it is a beautiful example of her writing:

'The lamps on the walls are burning low. I love this time, time between times. It's a soft grey bleed from night into morning.'

It is so atmospheric and it tells you so much about who Jem is. The descriptions of both Earth and Qita throughout Skyward Inn are stunning, and the way Jem tells stories of both not only lets you see these worlds but also lets you see how she sees them. What is it she notices? How does she describe it? Did she feel like less of a foreigner on Qita than she does in the Protectorate? Where is home for her? In this way Whiteley interweaves her main themes with her plot from the very beginning, until these questions become bigger and bigger and there is no way to escape these questions. Both Jem and Fosse were fascinating, if very different, protagonists, who struggle answering these questions for themselves. They felt very fleshed out, irrational in the way humans are, but also deeply intuitive. Isley stayed a little bit more of a mystery, but I do think that was rather on purpose. There are key images from Skyward Inn still deeply embedded in my mind and although I could talk about this novel extensively I struggled with writing this review. I have tried to avoid spoilers while still whetting your appetite, but the key takeaway should be that Whiteley is a spectacular author of Speculative and Science Fiction and you should really treat yourself to one of her books as soon as possible.

Skyward Inn is a beautiful book that asks its reader to truly think about their humanity and their home. With her eyes aimed at the stars and her feet solidly rooted on Earth, Whiteley has done it once again!

I love Aliya Whiteley - her novella The Beauty is one of my all-time favorites. This book however just never got going for me and I DNF'ed at the 20% mark, and I feel terrible about it. I feel that this is potentially a me issue, however, and would recommend this to someone who likes literary fiction and wants to take a dip into speculative sci-fi, as the author is undoubtedly talented. Perhaps the story condensed into a novella (to minimise the musing) could have kept my attention but at this point I am bored and underwhelmed.

Aliya Whiteley is an author I always follow with interest - The Beauty was an excellent novella, and The Loosening Skin took a great premise to some interesting places despite its rather odd structure - so I was intrigued about where this new novel would take things. What I got is a novel that started off with a quiet, unassuming premise, a pair of characters in a deliberately small setting dealing with deliberately small problems, which then proceeded to go in an absolutely wild direction until I wasn't even sure what I was reading any more. Is that bad? Is that good? I don't know! But don't settle into the first chapters of Skyward Inn thinking "this is going to be a fun, gentle slice of life SF" unless you enjoy being very, very wrong.

If it's not slice of life, what is it? Skyward Inn is the story of human war veteran Jem, her alien partner Isley, and her (human) son Fosse, all of whom live in The Western Protectorate, an area of western England that has seceded in order to be a full on microcosm of West Country-style Little Britain, complete with rampant distrust of outsiders and its very own border wall. Jem and Isley run the Skyward Inn, a pub in which the residents of the Protectorate gather to meet, drink and play darts. As a member of the alien Qita, who humanity conquered on their home planet years ago, Isley is just about tolerated within the xenophobia of the protectorate, but from the very beginning even Jem highlights the Other-ness of having an alien within her midst. When Won, another Qita, arrives seeking help, she sets in motion events that destablise the Protectorate from the inside out, at first running alongside what feel like more traditional pastoral conflicts like "which family member is going to inherit the farm", before the alien-ness of the Qita and the lingering questions around their original surrender to humanity engulf everything else. From that point, the story turns into biological horror interspersed with "first" contact documentation, in a way that is intriguing but never quite convinced me that it was a natural continuation of what had gone before. I think I can see what this story was trying to achieve by juxtaposing the small insular community of the Protectorate, grappling with its own version of a first contact history that seems too good to be true, with a present that has implications for the whole of humanity (but still filtered through that community) - it just never came together in the way I was hoping. However, I know that for other readers, this was a home run of a book, so your mileage may vary - regardless, Aliya Whiteley is an author who never fails to give me something weird and magical, and I'll be looking out for whatever comes next with just as much hope.

What did I just read? It was engrossing, fantastical, flowed well, and felt mildly unfulfilling. But I have no idea what the metaphor was. I mean I have ideas, but I’m probably wrong. This is not a feeling I enjoy being left with when finishing a story. All I can picture is that episode of Doctor
Who with poor Ursula.

This book, unfortunately, is a DNF for me. I got half way through the book and was totally lost. Just seams to be a lot of rambling.not enjoyable at all and am always sad when that happens.
3 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and the Author and publisher for a copy of this book. All opinions expressed are my own.

Well written and full of potential, unfortunately i found it confusing and too slow.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I was drawn to this book by the tagline: This is a place we can be alone, together.
As an introvert, and the last year of lockdowns / furloughs/ homeschooling being alone deeply appeals to me. I was so glad to be able to get lost in this book.
Is Domestic sci fi a thing? It seems a suitable label to try to slap onto this work.
Earth now consists of the Coalition, and the Western Protectorate -approximately Devon UK. Swansea is now a spaceport.
15 years ago, a portal or 'Kissing Gate' opened in space leading to the planet Qita. The Coalition travel there, but the Western Protectorate disagree with this, along with use of technology inside people's heads (“Coach”) so they choose to separate themselves from the rest of the world.
The story is told by Jem, owner of the titular inn. She works as a barmaid, alongside her partner Isley who is Qitan. They met when Jem fled to Qita following a teenage unplanned pregnancy, fathered by an exchange student.
Worldbuilding takes place when Jem drinks down the Jarrowbrew, an import from Qita that the Protectorate do not seem to mind. It has the property of enhancing memories. Isley pours Jem a shot and asks questions about her, or their past, and here we learn about how they met on at Tung Base and Jem’s experiences on Qita.
Another POV in the narrative is provided by Fosse, Jem’s son who she gave over to the care of her brother Dom. Fosse bunks off school to hang about at an abandoned farm, which is of course soon taken over by outsiders. Some humour in the book arises from Fosse’s notes he takes at the parish council meetings.
I have seen mention that some people found the book confusing, instead I let it wash over me and was thrillingly swept away. However when I got about 50% I began to wonder how on earth I was going to pin it all down – being so weird and wonderful. I consulted some published reviews for help and one mentioned “Body horror” and from about 60% onwards things took an even wilder turn.
For me this is a highly recommended title if you like something which on the surface seems pretty regular but stir up those waters and who knows what will emerge.

The Skyward Inn is about a pub in the Western Protectorate (set in England), where Jem and Isley serve a drink called the Brew, which comes from Qita, the nation that they had the war with, and from which Isley hails. Jem and Isley are from different sides of the war, but neither has any regrets or scars from the war. In the end, people come together in the Skyward Inn to tell stories of the times before the war with Qita.

Jem was away for 10 years and returned to run the Inn, and she has with her a son named Foss, but we don't know much about his parentage. What was patently clear in the novel was that Foss goes off on his own, but it was not clear exactly why he left.

I wanted to like this book, but I couldn't. I really tried hard. There is great world building bu slow development of what is going on, which made is difficult to stay with. I found it very slow to read. I committed to read the book until I finished. And, well, I'm glad that I did, but I have to say that I really don't understand what the point was. I recently read.

Though the unfolding of the story was just too slow for me, it might be okay for others. The fact that it tries to explore themes of identity relationships (especially with Jem and Foss) could make this truly wonderful, however, it unfolded too slow for me. I was very disappointed in the book and I can't recommend this highly.

I would like to thank the author, Solaris Publishers and NetGalley for the copy. I am voluntarily leaving this review.

I was drawn right in to this story! An enjoyable story written well. Thank you Net Galley for allowing me to enjoy the ARC in exchange for my honest feedback!

Thank you to NetGalley, Rebellion and Solaris for the ARC in return for my honest review.

I like sci-fi / fantasy books but unfortunately, this wasn’t for me. It wasn’t what I expected from the description. I don’t mind slower paced stories, but the beginning was confusing, and maybe because something just didn’t come together for me in the story and the writing. I think it was a challenge to read as well because I just didn’t connect with the characters.

There were a lot of great reviews for this book, it just wasn’t for me.

On the coast of what used to be Devon sits a small inn called Skyward Inn. It's a place where people come to relax and share stories and it's run by a human woman called Jem, and a not-so-human Isley. Jem and Isley have a close relationship, and Jem feels more comfortable with Isley than her own family - including her son Fosse who lives nearby with his uncle. But as strange things start happening, and strangers appear on the shores, Jem finds herself reaching out to Fosse and connecting with him in a way she never did before.

This book was just...not what I thought it was going to be, to be honest, and maybe because of this I really struggled with it and I don't think I enjoyed it at all. I know this book is being compared a little bit to the Wayfarers Series by Becky Chambers, and while there are some similarities such as the slower pace, the easy exploration of space without guns and bloodshed but I also think it's very different in lots of other ways and may not suit readers who prefer Becky Chamber's storytelling.

I was confused for a good portion of the book trying to figure out what was going on, and I honestly, can't say for certain I 100% knew what had happened by the time I finished it. The story and writing just didn't gel with me at all, and I felt myself very disconnected to the story and part of this may have just been disappointment when I realised early on, the style of writing was not what I expected it to be.

I've read a good bit of science fiction now and sometimes the stories stick with you, and sometimes they don't and this was just the case of a don't.

This is an incredibly hard book to review because I'm really not at all sure what actually happened. The writing is beautiful but the plot has fried my brain and I just don't know what to think. It starts gently - slightly confusingly - but gently nonetheless. We're in the Western Protectorate - south west England as it would be today - where the people have set up their own society and withdrawn from the rest of the UK (maybe the rest of the world). Well that sounds pretty understandable. There's a disease going around and they're not letting outsiders in - or rather only in controlled ways. Oh, and the main protagonist's boyfriend comes from another planet. And his friend has come to stay.

Yes, that's all a bit flippant but my brain is trying to handle some bizarre stuff right now. Themes around colonisation, discrimination, parenthood, society, Parish Council Meetings, and portals to another world are all a bit too much to handle.

It's a very long time since I went anywhere near Sci Fi (unless you can count Margaret Atwood and her dystopian novels) and this is not what I was expecting. The style is very 'literary' and then suddenly everybody's melting and the world's gone bonkers.

Something tells me this would be a great book if I actually 'got' it a bit more. With thanks to Netgalley and the publishers.

**I received a free digital copy of this work from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review**

To be entirely honest, I'm not sure how I feel about this book. As I read, I became more and more confused. It seemed as though every answer I came across spawned twelve more questions. The story itself was interesting and multi-faceted, however, the way it was conveyed came across as a bit disjointed. A book referenced in the synopsis was "Jamaica Inn", so the only thing that I can surmise is that reading that book was some sort of prerequisite for understanding the way this book flowed. That being said, I have not read "Jamaica Inn," so I can't confirm if that is indeed the case. All I can say for certain is that this is either a very confusing book by nature, or I am simply not the right sort of reader to understand its nuances. Not the worst thing I've ever read, but by far the most confusing.

Thank you to Rebellion Publishing and NetGalley for the digital ARC of Skyward Inn.

I was intrigued by the description of this book, it’s not necessarily what I would normally pick up, but it sounded too interesting to turn down. This is a very interesting sci-fi novel, it seems to jump between genres. Sometimes it reads as a fairly simple sci-fi, then the next moment its like a literary fiction novel. Literary fiction isn’t a genre I read often at all, and I do think that it was this that may have reduced my overall enjoyment of the novel. It was an enjoyable read, but was missing a certain something that makes a novel special for me.



This novel is a moral and philosophical sci-fi read which honestly I just found to be a wee bit too much. The intentions and messaging the author was trying to convey about humanity and the cycle of life and death was just a bit too heavy for the novel. The messages were too deep for the novel to carry I felt, and as such it floundered about in the middle, unable to be any specific thing.

I also struggled to connect to any of the characters in Skyward Inn. We follow the perspective of a number of characters, and honestly I didn’t feel anything for any of them! As a result I didn’t really get drawn into the story, and I honestly wasn’t really bothered about any of them.This really drew me out of the story a bit, just being unable to actually care for the characters.

I wish we had been given more backstory about the world and the setting of the story. I do understand why it wasn’t focussed on, it wasn’t really the purpose of the story, but nonetheless it made it difficult to place the story and its purpose within the world. The reader is left trying to scrape a background together from clues dropped throughout, which I feel was a missed opportunity to give us more background, and better cement the themes of the novel.

Overall I thought this novel was ok. It’s not my normal sub-genre of science fiction novel, and as such I am not that surprised that I didn’t love it as much as I could have. If you enjoy Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation trilogy, I would give this novel a try!

"‘What are those?’ while pointing at Fosse’s shoes.
"‘Shoes,’ he said, very clearly, as if talking to a young child.
"‘I thought they were regulation standard military Coalition issued walking apparel,’ it said.
"It was strange how being more precise with language could move everyone further away from a mutual level of understanding."

This is a seriously weird, in the true sense of the word, dream-like short novel. At just 157 pages, Aliya Whiteley’s Skyward Inn is the sort of book your university literature professors warn you of – “Beware the short book”. Dense with meaning and meandering through time and place, the only thing that anchors it is Skyward Inn. Which, in itself, turns out not to be quite as it seemed either.

The Kissing Gate opened up a couple of decades ago, a sort of Stargate portal connecting the sky over Swansea (U.K.) to Qita, a planet far away, with life forms that are a little like us, but also not at all like us.

Using the payout from a 10-year contract on Qita, Jem (human) her friend Isley (Qitan) opened the Skyward Inn, a pub in a small village. The Western Protectorate has cut themselves off from the rest of the U.K., rejecting modern technology – and the Qitans (except Isley) – and choosing the live in simple farming communities.

Jem and Isley serve up diluted Jarrowbrew, a Qitan speciality, to the locals. After closing each night, Isley serves pure Jarrowbrew to Jem. He enjoys listening to her stories of her time on Qita; stories which are pulled into sharp focus by the Jarrowbrew.

When another Qitan is found in the Western Protectorate, the Skyward Inn provides shelter. But her arrival and the slow advance of the quarantines will change everything forever.

This is the kind of novel you probably need to read several times, talk to others about, and write serious essays on, in order to truly appreciate it fully.

I really enjoyed it because it presented such a very different possibility of what life beyond our world might be like. At the same time it presents food for thought about our Earth-bound lives, particularly in our times. What does ‘war’ look like? Is colonisation only a physical defeat, or can it be more, or less, or just different?

If you enjoy Claire G. Coleman’s novels you’ll love Skyward Inn.

I’ll leave you with this quote, which I think is relevant to us all:

"But then it occurred to him that it had only seemed easy from the outside, not knowing how it was achieved. He simply hadn’t understood that aspect of the guide’s life, along with so much else of it."

**I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion**
I have honestly never read a book quite like this. A science fiction story set in a world where humans are at war with a planet called Qita. A human named Jem owns the Skyward Inn that she runs with a Qitan named Isley whom she met while fighting in the war on Qita. One day another Qitan named Won shows up unexpectedly and slowly things start to get weird. Throughout the whole story I had no idea where it was going in the best possible way. I really enjoyed reading this book but at times got a little confused about who I was reading about and where the story was taking place. The first half does go a little slow for my taste but really picks up in the second half.

This is a hard book for me to rate. I have mixed feelings - I enjoyed the writing style but I found the bouncing timeline between current life in the Protectorate and Qitan confusing sometimes. A bit surrealistic. There's plenty of angst to go around..... Jem and her regrets on parenting, Fosse (her son) and his feelings of 'apartness', Dom (her brother) and his own issues.

The sci-fi element is that one being from Qitan is living in the Protectorate and from him we get little random hints of his home planet. I could definitely have used more Qitan world building - in a more concrete way. Maybe that sums up my overall feelings - I wanted a more concrete story with defined edges.

While the writing is evocative and readable, the story itself was a little too random and vague for me. However, true sci-fi readers who love that sort of slow-burn, quiet paced, introspective story, will love this book.

Thanks so much to #NetGalley and #Solaris publishing for the ARC of this book. The opinions above are my own.