Book Review: Sky Ghosts: All For One by Alexandra Engellmann

I love the concept of the digital book. I have hundreds of books on my kindle app and bunches more as PDFs. They take up no more space or weight in my back pack than my lap top. I love that I have access to a library spanning genres, but gosh I miss window shopping. Nothing beats going into a book store or a library and just browsing the stacks until that “One” book leaps off the shelf into your hand. The best book finds are the ones you weren’t looking for. Let’s face it, there are so many of those kind out there to find. Window shopping for Kindle books is just a little bit more difficult. That is why i am always excited when someone sends me in the direction of a great book or series. Sky Ghosts: All For One is a great example

Title: Sky Ghosts: All for One /Author: Alexandra Engellmann
/Publication Date: December 7th 2014 / Pages: 360 /
Available on Amazon and Goodreads

Goodreads Summary:

Their lives depend on their swords.
Their battlefield is all around you.
They fight against the scariest monsters – their own kind.
How many of them are in your city?

Under the cover of night, unseen in their black gear against the black sky, there are Sky Ghosts – warriors and assassins, who have been hiding among humans for centuries, revealing their supernatural abilities only to the human elite. They are bodyguards of the highest level and protectors of their cities at night, when they hunt those who chose the dark side, Sky Beasts.

In New York City, there are two fighters that Sky Beasts hate more than anyone – Jane and Pain, two sisters who don’t think twice about beheading a Beast or two. One night, they save two boys from their enemies’ blades, and since that moment, their lives are effectively ruined. The whole Sky Beasts gang is now after them, and not only the boys are in danger, but everybody the sisters love and care about.
As a war threatens to break out, the main mystery remains unsolved: why would the Beasts hunt two ordinary human boys?

Sky Ghosts: All for One is the first book in the Sky Ghosts series that won’t leave indifferent fans of sword fighting, fantasy romance, and the woman warrior genre.

I will admit it, I knew I would like this book after reading the dedication. It didn’t give away the end, but it showed an acute sense of humor. There is so much to like about this book. For starters, there is no set POV for this story. For many readers the POV establishes who the main character is, tells us who we should be paying attention to. Some authors try to pass it around and too often that leads to continuity and flow issues with the story. Who wants to read a novel that sounds like it should be four different stories? That was not an issue here. Changing between the main characters was seamless and allowed the reader to take time to consider what was really going on in the story and just who the story was actually about.

I totally enjoyed the characters . There is always a chance with super powers to be cliche. The powers either corrupt a person or they are unrealistically altruistic, and in almost all cases non powered characters either become bitter or sycophantic. Not so here. The Sky Ghosts are made up of wonderfully diverse people that never seem to lose their human frailty despite being able to fly, fight to death and heal themselves like total badasses. Their “powerless” counterparts may seem a bit lost at first, but only because they are thrown into a world so unlike what they know. They all have something to offer and there is a nice balance that plays out to the end of the story. I really loved that the strong women stayed feminine and even a bit girly and that the men managed, in the end at least, to appreciate their strength along with the feminine and girly.

I liked that this story isn’t just supernatural, it isn’t just action, it isn’t just a romance. Real life doesn’t work that way and it is nice to see it reflected in fiction. It had some great twists and even when I knew what was coming I didn’t see it all, which is refreshing for me. I do have one complaint. The synopsis refers to Dave and Chad as boys and going into the story based on that, I was expecting children not young men actually older than than the sisters who are fighters that an army of Sky Beasts fear.

This book had me hooked from beginning to end. It would have been a terrific page turner had there been pages to turn. I cannot wait to read the rest of the series and see how it plays out. I heartily recommend this book to everyone 8th grade and up. There is violence and some minor adult humor.

This Bookworm awards “Sky Ghosts:One For All” 5 Tomes