Book #75 of 2024: The Sky King (Skyriders Book 2) | DNF: Midnyte’s Dragon Kiss

The Sky King (Skyriders Book 2) by Polly Holyoke.

Quick synopsis: After all the losses in the battle that concluded book 1, humanity is in a bad position for when the chimerae attack again. They need more skysteeds, so Kie and her friends go off on a mission to find the wild herds of them.

Brief opinion: A fun story marred by some big editing issues.

Plot: There were massive casualties after the Thousand Chimerae War, both humans and skysteeds. Like horses, skysteeds breed slowly, so Kie and company fly off to the wilds to try to convince the Sky King (leader of all wild skysteeds) to allow the wild ones to bond with people if they wish.

The flight there is long and hard, and once they arrive the humans find more battles to fight. A new monster has shown up to try to kill all the wild ones, so Kie and company must defeat them and then convince the Sky King to let his followers pair with humans if they wish to.

Writing/editing: Of the first book I wrote "Both were excellent!", but this book... sheesh. The name of the flying horse breed is "skysteed". It was one of the most common words used in book one. Why in book two was it written "sky-steed" so often? Dozens of times. The books were published only a year apart, I have no idea why such a basic-to-the-story word could be written differently so many times.

The words "loyal" and "brave" were used before skysteed names so often that it felt more like the author was telling, not showing.

There were other issues, like words being hyphenated in the middle of a line ("remem-bering").

There were issues with the story, like in book 1 it was said that skysteeds couldn't fly until they were two years old (wings not strong enough), but in this book foals and yearlings endlessly flew. (It's possible in book 1 it was meant that domestic skysteeds couldn't until they were two years old, since they're heavier than wild ones, but it wasn't clear.)

And issues with logic, like wooden arrows being perfectly fine to use "hundreds" of years after being made and being stored in a box in a cave.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: Of book 1 I had said "I really liked that the skysteeds weren't human-level intelligence creatures.", but in this book they were.

"The Great Binding gave skysteeds the ability to think as humans do."

Sadly sometimes they seemed more people-in-horse-shape than actual horses.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️⭐️½ -- 3.5 stars, somewhere between okay and liked. The story was quite fun, but "sky-steed" kept making me grumpy every time I hit one.

Will there be a book 3? The story seems like it needs a conclusion, but who knows. There's no mention of it online, and at the end of this story there were chapters from the first book instead of the next one, which is odd.

DNF #61: Midnyte's Dragon Kiss by Jessie D. Eaker. Teenage succubus Lapis Midnyte has to hide what she is, since other races (witches, vampires, humans, etc) don't like anyone who is a succubus.

Nothing about this self-published story hooked me, the writing didn't work for me ("Dawn-clan", "Twilight-Clan"), and I twitched every time I saw "Midnyte", so I DNFed it.