After finishing Jay’s Gay Agenda, I stumbled across this one either on Amazon or Overdrive in a “similar books” list. The cover was adorable and then I read the blurb and immediately requested a copy of it.
The Sky Blues is a delightful debut novel that tugs at all the heart strings without causing too much angst to the reader, highlights the importance of found family and community, and gives all the young LGBT+/queer kids out there another wonderful book to read that’s full of hope, wonder, and joy.
I’m slowly coming to expect great things from Roan Parrish. Every time I pick up a novel by her I know there’s going to be a decent chunk of it dedicated to emotional turmoil of some sort and another good chunk of it dedicated to really making you feel the setting of the novel. And she did not disappoint with this one.
And a bonus Hanukkah novel for what was initially my final book in the 12 Books of MM Holiday Romance binge. I’m capping it at 16 because that’s how many I apparently had already downloaded to my Kindle ¯_(ツ)_/¯. I honestly wasn’t paying attention and as I read and removed I added more. Don’t get me wrong there will be more MM romances, but I need to save the hundreds of others for future years, right?
I wasn’t sure what to expect going into this. When the publisher reached out to me about an ARC I liked the synopsis and loved the fact Lepionka co-hosts a podcast called “Unlikeable Female Characters”, so said sure why not.*
What this books needs more than anything, is a good editor: there were continuity errors, there were issues with over description and there were issues with dialogue. And the saddest part is the story and characters were solid enough, but the editing really let it down. [Some of it may have been fixed in the final version of the book, but if it were me I would not have released this to reviewers with these types of errors.]