Steeped in the surreal, Aliya Whiteley uses her unique storytelling abilities in Skyward Inn to create a story that will leave readers feeling unsettled, yet oddly hopeful.
Skyward Inn is the place to go in the Western Protectorate if you need to unwind and relieve the times before the war. Jem and Isley, once on opposite sides of the war that ended almost too quickly when Earth invaded Qita, run the inn and slowly meander through their days together. Elsewhere, Jem’s son Fosse is also meandering through life. But both Jem and Fosse soon have strangers enter their space, bringing with them earthly jealousy and alien uncertainty that will ripple across the land and time.
With Skyward Inn, Aliya Whiteley deftly crafts an atmosphere of creeping uncertainty and strangeness that will follow readers past its pages. At times a mind-bendingly vast concept, the novel ultimately boils down to an intimate story of identity, belonging, and fractured relationships. Within this speculative fiction story, Whiteley has interwoven a delicate family drama that propels the characters, and the reader, through the novel.
Jem and her estranged son, Fosse, are the core of the story. Their relationship is one of the few steady footings readers will find in this vague and weird novel. We follow these two as their quiet lives are upended by the arrival of strangers and they start to enter each other’s orbit again. Jem embodies a kind of regretful longing that will resonate with many. Fosse may be a little harder to connect with for some readers, but Whiteley still builds out an aching characterisation of this mother and son relationship.
There is a vagueness that runs through the story that both adds to the atmosphere and detracts being able to truly grasp what is going on. Whiteley writes Skyward Inn in a style that feels like a combination of the boat scene from Willy Wonka (1971) and sitting at a local bar at 2pm in the afternoon with a pitcher of cheap beer and the townies telling stories of the glory days. Some moments you feel like you are drifting along with the characters in their small lives and then suddenly you’ve lost your footing along with them and you are left confused and wondering what is coming. It makes for an interesting reading experience, one that some will love and others will not click with.
With that said, Whiteley’s writing style is something that feels wholly its own. Skyward Inn is the kind of book that many will finish and think of how they’ll never find a story quite like it again. Whiteley has a way with flow and structure that propels the story forward, but never quite lets you grasp where you are heading.
At the end of the day, Skyward Inn is an experience. It’s one of those books you’ll have to read, because no one will be able to properly sum up what it is like to read it. Everyone will take something different from this eerie and exploratory story. One thing is for certain though: Whiteley is a strong voice in speculative fiction and readers will be delighted and unsettled by her novels for years to come.
Skyward Inn is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of March 16th 2021.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
This is a place where we can be alone, together.
Skyward Inn, on the moorlands of the Western Protectorate, is removed from modern technology and politics. Theirs is a quiet life – The Protectorate has stood apart from the coalition of world powers that has formed. Instead the inhabitants choose to live simply, many of them farming by day and drinking the local brew at night.
The co-owners of the inn are Jem and Isley. Jem, a veteran of the coalitions’ war on the perfect, peaceful planet of Qita, has a smile for everyone in the bar. Her partner Isley does his cooking in the kitchen and his brewing in the cellar. He’s Qitan, but it’s all right – the locals treat him like one of their own. They think they understand him, but it’s only Jem who knows his homeland well enough to recreate it in the stories she tells him at dawn.
Skyward Inn is Jamaica Inn by way of Ursula Le Guin, bringing the influences, too, of Angela Carter, Michel Faber and Jeff Vandermeer to create a fantastic story of love, belonging, and togetherness. Asking questions of ideas of the individual and the collective, of ownership and historical possession, and of the experience of being human, it is at once timeless and thoroughly of its time.
