It’s a mesmeric world, comic in the way teenage voyages of self-discovery inevitably are, but with an undertone of menace, horror, even hints of allegory. Satire, too ... Fantasy, sure, but recognitions flare. Ms. Smith’s imagination is inexhaustible. The Sky Is Yours is a great and disturbing debut, which colonizes a new realm of the magic city.
Rather than a genre mash-up, this is a genre car crash: kinetic, explosive, and uproariously messy. That mad energy is infectious ... Smith's gifts of imagination are staggering. Her world-building is a tangled sprawl of past, present, and future, a wickedly satirical synthesis that underlines just how fractured our own realities can be during periods of fear, unrest, inequality, and instability. But she does far more than hold up a cracked mirror to our world. In language that punches and caresses, she dwells on ugliness and beauty in equal measure ... The Sky Is Yours filters youth through a warped yet poignantly canny speculative-fiction lens. At the same time, it's funny as hell, full of madcap detail, firecracker dialogue, and a healthy dose of absurdism in the face of darkness.
Chandler Klang Smith has unleashed her own slipstream, genrefluid monster of a book—that also happens to be fun, visceral, heartbreaking, and genuinely funny. The Sky Is Yours is bursting with ideas and characters, and I’d advise you take a break after reading it, because other books are probably going to seem a bit black-and-white for a while ... Smith’s language is incandescent, but more important it’s fun ... There were times I realized I was reading so fast that my brain couldn’t catch up with my eyes, and I finally had to force myself to slow down and reread an entire section—any book that can capture me that much is one I’m going to recommend ... The Sky Is Yours may be a rollicking adventure, but it also has a bracing, honest heart.
That plot swoops and glides all over the landscape; the sheer ambit of topics Smith pulls in to her larger narrative is astonishingly varied, ranging from radical income inequality to outsized parodies of today's celebrity culture to social commentary on cults and religions – and all of it punctuated with scenes of almost granular detail, small moments of deep-detail cinematic close-ups ... The Sky is Yours is a debut of prodigious, almost throwaway inventiveness and storytelling enthusiasm, setting an extremely high bar for the rest of 2018's science fiction. It's the bravura announcement of a major new literary voice.
...smart science fiction filled with atmosphere, edgy worldbuilding, and characters who are difficult to sympathize with—and all the more human for that ... The Sky Is Yours describes a strange and gritty landscape, and I wonder what else is out there beyond this ruined city. It is a wholly immersive world, and the characters provide an often uncomfortable ride through it all—it’s a riveting read, but not an easy one, content to leave its mysteries unexplained ... It’s over the top in the best way—an ambitious, unsettling book, worth the trip.
Every sentence - every improbable concept that Klang Smith throws into this giant, sloppy stew of a book - examines that thesis, and bolsters it, and broadcasts it. All that everything, it turns out, is there for a reason.
Smith’s novel calls to mind the works of Nick Harkaway and Game of Thrones. Although the story is overlong, it gathers momentum in its last third, bringing this novel home with a hopeful conclusion. It’s an auspicious debut with enough inventiveness for two novels
