Finding Sky - Joss Stirling

Finding Sky is the debut novel from Joss Stirling. It is published by Oxford University press in October 2010 and is 320 pages long.

Plot

Sky Bright has just been uprooted from finally having a normal life. Her adoptive parents have decided to move from England to Wickenridge, Colorado due to work and the two couldn’t be any more different. Although High School is an extremely strange experience for Sky, she manages to make some good friends quickly and they show her how things work and who everyone is. Someone who immediately stands out to Sky is well known bad boy, Zed. After seeing him for the first time, she can’t get him out of her head…literally. All the girls in Wickenridge want a piece of Zed but he pays them no attention. He only seems to have eyes for Sky even though she thinks he doesn’t like her.

Zed informs Sky that they have a lot more in common than she ever could have thought. They are both Savants, people with extremely special gifts. Savants each have a soulfinder, someone who balances our their gifts and also the person that they are going to be with forever. When Zed tells Sky that she is his soulfinder, she has no idea what he is talking about and doesn’t believe that she too is a Savant.

Sky has had a troubled past though and has a hard time believing anything he says about being a Savant but the two seem to be connected. Sky and Zed aren’t the only Savants though and someone else knows their secret. Sky is going to have to learn to deal with this shocking news quickly otherwise her time with Zed could be cut very short.

What I thought
As soon as I heard about this book, I desperately wanted to read it. Everything about it made me want to read it, including the extremely pretty background (even though it reminds me of Shiver).

I loved the world that Joss Stirling created. The idea of Savants were clearly established and she added a lot of information about the characters‘ gifts. Although there was no real history behind why people were this way, there was the idea of the 7th of 7 children. I thought that this gave Savants a bit more depth instead of just randomly being who they were. I did have slightly mixed feelings about the soulfinder thing though but I will get to that soon.

It seems like female main characters are growing on my lately as I really liked Sky. Her reactions to Zed’s strong affections towards her were only natural, which is why she wasn’t focusing on the supernatural aspects of what he was telling her. I would freak out if someone told me they wanted to spend their whole life with me at that age! In any normal circumstance I would have said that it was completely unbelievable but both Sky and Zed being Savants saved this part of the story for me. That is why I had slightly mixed feeling about ‘soulfinders’. Sky was also a really strong character who wasn’t about to let anyone tell her what to do. If I had been in her situation at the beginning of the book, living somewhere that is so different from what she is used to, I don’t think I could have been as strong as she was. Sky had a lot of determination to make her new life work for her and she wasn’t about to let anything get in the way of that.

Sky’s background is revealed at a good pace that runs really well with the rest of the story. Nothing is given away too early or fully until the right time. I liked how it went back and forth from Wickenridge to the action with the other Savants. The intensity gradually progresses at different stages in the story and it kept the story really well paced, giving a fantastic mix of action and explanation when the times were right.

Zed and his family were all great characters because of their different gifts and personalities. Not so sure about all of their weird names though! It would have been nice for at least one of them to have a normal name or for the reasons for their names to have been explained. In such a large family, Joss Stirling managed to give them all their own voice and let them stand out. They were all quite important characters as the story went on so it was good that they didn’t all blend into one.

After so much happening, it was nice to see that there was no massive cliff-hanger. Even though Finding Sky works extremely well as a stand alone book, I would still like to see a sequel. I would like to see how Sky works through her problems and how things work out for her and Zed but most of all, I want to know her real name. Something else that could be quite interesting is if we got a book for each of Zed’s brothers and follow them in their quests to find their soulfinder.

Finding Sky is a great book with an interesting story and loveable characters. I know I’ll be wanting Joss Stirling’s next book after reading this one.