Contemporary Authors

https://lccn.loc.gov/2013375572 Smith, Chandler Klang, 1984- Goldenland past dark / by Chandler Klang Smith. 1st ed. Toronto : ChiZine Publications, c2013. 274 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. PS3619.M55456 G64 2013 ISBN: 9781927469354 (pbk.)

• The Sky Is Yours: A Novel - 2018 Hogarth, https://smile.amazon.com/Sky-Yours-Chandler-Klang-Smith/dp/0451496264/ref=sr_1_1_twi_har_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1519876303&sr=8-1&keywords=Smith%2C+Chandler+Klang

• Chandler Klang Smith - http://www.chandlerklangsmith.com/about/

  A graduate of Bennington College and the creative writing MFA program at Columbia University, Chandler Klang Smith has worked in book publishing, as a ghostwriter, and for the KGB Bar literary venue. She has served twice as a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards. She teaches and tutors in New York City.

The Sky Is Yours
Lynnanne Pearson
Booklist.
114.6 (Nov. 15, 2017): p35. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Sky Is Yours.
By Chandler Klang Smith.
Jan. 2018.464p. Hogarth, $27 (9780451496263); e-book, $13.99 (9780451496287).
Two dragons rose from the sea in the year 301970. The dragons have since set fire to much of Empire Island, leaving behind a dystopian wasteland. It is only the very rich and the very poor who have survived. The rich form alliances with each other in the hope of the city returning to its former splendor. One such alliance is the marriage contract between teenagers Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg (Swanny) and reality-show star Duncan Ripple V. Not happy about that marriage is Abby, a feral girl whom Duncan romanced when his personal aircraft crashed on her garbage island. These three proceed to tangle with each other, the residents of a prison colony, and the dragons. While "dystopia with dragons" sounds like an intriguing new genre hybrid, the book sometimes fails to live up to its creative premise. The action is slow to start, and far too much time is given to spoiled-brat Duncan. Swanny, however, is the genuine star of the show. Loud, vibrant, and witty, she crackles with energy and life. Let's hope she returns, sans Duncan the Dud.--Lynnanne Pearson
YA: Teens will likely to be drawn to dynamic Swanny, as well as the love-triangle plot and dystopian setting. SH.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pearson, Lynnanne. "The Sky Is Yours." Booklist, 15 Nov. 2017, p. 35. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517441787/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=4294c057. Accessed 28 Feb. 2018.
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The Sky Is Yours
Publishers Weekly.
264.41 (Oct. 9, 2017): p40+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Sky Is Yours
Chandler Klang Smith. Hogarth, $27 (464p) ISBN 978-0-451-49626-3
Smith's hyperimaginative debut takes place in a futuristic, decaying variation on New York City called Empire Island that has two dragons--one green, one yellow--constantly circling overhead and menacing the population below. Eighteen-year-old Duncan Humphrey Ripple V, star of the reality series Late Capitalism's Royalty, has been engaged to the Baroness Swan "Swanny" Lenore Dahlberg (who has been homeschooled by her single-minded mother, Pippi) by his parents (financier Humphrey and former model Katya). While exploring beyond the city, Duncan meets a wild girl named Abby and brings her back to his family's mansion. On his wedding night, he decides to run away with her, but the mansion is invaded by marauders from the self-governed prison colony of Torchtown, forcing Duncan, Swanny, and Abby to run away together. They escape into the dark heart of the city; Duncan learns how to fight fires--a constant in this dragon- threatened metropolis--Abby befriends a magic rat, and Swanny winds up in Torchtown. 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. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Sky Is Yours." Publishers Weekly, 9 Oct. 2017, p. 40+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A511293290/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=3036980b. Accessed 28 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A511293290
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The Sky is Yours: A novel
Chandler Klang Smith
Library Journal.
142.11 (June 15, 2017): p4a. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
A sprawling, genre-defying epic set in a dystopian New York plagued bydragons, this debut is pure storytelling pleasure.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 978-0-4514-9626-3 | $27.00/$36.00C | 50,000 Hogarth | HC | January
* 978-0-4514-9628-7 | * AD: 978-1-5247-5747-2 LITERARY SCIENCE FICTION / FANTASY
Social: Facebook.com/ChandlerKS RA: For readers of Lauren Graff, Donna Tartt, and Nell Zink RI: Author lives in New York, NY
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Klang Smith, Chandler. "The Sky is Yours: A novel." Library Journal, 15 June 2017, p. 4a. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495668159/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=6c022652. Accessed 28 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495668159
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Pearson, Lynnanne. "The Sky Is Yours." Booklist, 15 Nov. 2017, p. 35. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517441787/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=4294c057. Accessed 28 Feb. 2018. "The Sky Is Yours." Publishers Weekly, 9 Oct. 2017, p. 40+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A511293290/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=3036980b. Accessed 28 Feb. 2018. Klang Smith, Chandler. "The Sky is Yours: A novel." Library Journal, 15 June 2017, p. 4a. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495668159/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6c022652. Accessed 28 Feb. 2018.

• Strange Horizons
  http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/goldenland-past-dark-by-chandler-klang-smith/
  Word count: 3254

  Goldenland Past Dark by Chandler Klang Smith
  Nina Allan
  Issue: 23 September 2013
  Goldenland Past Dark cover

  It has been said of young adult fiction that much of the appeal for a writer lies in the act of reduction, in stripping their young protagonist of everything that makes the world familiar or comfortable for him or her—parents, siblings, a home, a country even—and then exploring through the means of story how that protagonist will deal with and eventually overcome such bereavements and progress to adulthood. Such a wholesale rendering down can be trickier to accomplish in general fiction. An adult protagonist usually has greater agency within and a fuller understanding of the world in which the story takes place, more experience, and more ties to society. Short of providing your characters with a full-blown apocalypse to deal with, the sense of loneliness that is the bedrock of much of the most affecting YA literature can be harder to contrive. One way of achieving this is to create a microcosm of alienation, a world within the world, where pettier jealousies can stand in for more far-reaching conflicts, and where the monstrous, the illicit, and the fantastic become instantly credible by virtue of being so specifically localized. As a venue for the exaggerated, the excessive, and the arcane, it is easy to see why circus has proved such a popular backdrop for so many memorable narratives, especially within the canon of the fantastic.

  The childhood fantasy of "running away with the circus" will be familiar to many, and the circus in literature is often a working out of such dreams of escape. People in books join the circus because they want their world to end, and as the catch-all home of the disenfranchised, the malcontent, the destitute, and the disadvantaged, of freaks both singularly disabled and preternaturally gifted, the traveling carnival provides a ready-made, self-contained universe of strangeness that is instantly recognizable and with a useful number of preexisting tropes and character types. The writer may add individual embellishments, but he or she can feel confident at the outset that many of the difficulties of building a world from scratch have been removed.

  Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939) is set on the fringes of the Hollywood movie industry rather than in the circus as such, but the narrative, populated as it is by dropouts and freaks united mainly through their desire to make it big, has much in common with later novels that are more specifically circus-based and could be said to be their progenitor. William Gresham's 1946 noir Nightmare Alley, inspired by the author's acquaintance with an ex-carnival worker during the Spanish Civil War, is one of the first modern circus narratives. The novel portrays the itinerant lifestyle of sideshow performers as a constantly fermenting cocktail of violence and uncertainty. Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) famously reveals the dangers of giving up what you know in favor of what you dream of. With its intertwining of nostalgia for vanished childhood with some of the more sinister aspects of adult-child relationships, it has proved a model of inspiration for later writers. Circus novels are now numerous enough to classify as a sub-genre.

  Stories about the circus have tended to center themselves around three core plot dynamics: a "normal" protagonist running away to join the circus (Something Wicked This Way Comes, Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus [1984], Patricia Geary's Strange Toys [1987], Will Elliot's The Pilo Family Circus [2006]), escalating rivalries among the company threatening to tear the circus apart from within (Katherine Dunn's Geek Love [1989], Tod Browning's 1932 film Freaks, Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus [2011], Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 movie The Greatest Show on Earth), or a destructive, predatory, or competitive force from outside threatening the circus's existence (Karen Russell's Swamplandia! [2011], Genevieve Valentine's Mechanique [2011], Kim Lakin Smith’s Cyber Circus [2011]). The circus has featured so often now in literature and film that even the most gifted writer would find themselves hard pressed to bring even a scrap of originality to a circus story of any kind, and especially to that kind of story that is "about circus" as opposed to merely being set there. Any writer wishing to avoid falling prey to this cycle of repetition must necessarily take it upon themselves not so much to reinvent the wheel as to invent something else, something to talk about other than the wonder and alienation of a life spent learning to perform bizarre acts within the confines of a secretive and closed community.

  For the speculative writer, the immediate temptation is to base the action on another planet, or in an alternate reality, but this once innovative approach has proved so attractive it is itself rapidly becoming a core part of the canon. Some writers have found a greater power and interest in stripping the circus of its glittery trappings. Hilary Mantel's novels The Giant, O'Brien (1998) and Beyond Black (2005) could be described as circus novels without the circus, as could Patrick McGrath's Martha Peake (2000), all narratives of non-normative experience in a normative world.

  I was first attracted by Chandler Klang Smith's new circus novel Goldenland Past Dark because its premise seemed to suggest that the author had found another similarly interesting new angle on carnival narrative. Goldenland Past Dark is set in the 1960s, setting it immediately apart from other, more traditionally retro-feel circus novels. Webern "Bernie" Bell, disfiguringly crippled in a childhood accident, is driven to escape an increasingly unhappy adolescence by joining the embryonic old-time carnival of Dr Schoenberg. Dr Show, as he is known to all, discerns in Bernie a talent for clowning, and promises him a magical new life in this the noblest of the theatrical professions. He adapts quickly to life on the road, finding fellowship with Brunhilde the bearded lady, Al the giant, and Vlad and Fydor the conjoined twins, and eventually love with Nepenthe, a young woman with reptilian scales whose real first name is Eliza. The cast of characters is long familiar from other circus novels. Each character is deftly evoked, but when we look for something new here we don't really find it. I had hoped to see Smith making full use of her 1960s setting to explore such themes as the decline of circus in the post-war era, the impact of more modern forms of media entertainment on the lives of artists who depend on centuries-old skills to make a living. But for its first 150 pages, Goldenland Past Dark is not so much a story about the shock of the new as a traditional "running away with the circus" tale that could equally have been set half a century earlier.

  This problem is compounded when we consider the fact that Smith seems so wrapped up in painstakingly evoking the already-very-familiar ambiance of circus that she forgets to enliven her actual story with any genuine sense of narrative tension. Part One of the novel opens with an altercation between Dr Show and Mars Boulder, a sword swallower who seems intent on destroying Schoenberg because of a long-running feud over a stolen sword. Boulder is subdued by a blow to the head and left unconscious. The company makes a run for it, abandoning their scheduled list of performances and skipping from one obscure town to the next in a procession of declining audiences. A hundred pages later and with no clear story emerging they have a minor run-in with the law and once again find themselves on the run. The cycle of events repeats itself. Now halfway through the novel, we cannot avoid the sense that nothing has happened.

  Equally confounding to me was the novel's tendency to slither away from its historical background. There are frequent references to Brunhilde's life in Germany prior to World War II. She carries her few possessions in a suitcase shellacked all over with photographs of the destruction of Dresden, where she lived with her family, and her constant harping on this atrocity makes her unpopular with the rest of the company. Yet for the purposes of this narrative Smith seems to have forgotten the existence of the Nazis and the actual pre-war conditions inside the Germany they terrorized:

  She had lost the crowds that would pay any price to see her long ago, in the firebombing. She had also lost her glockenspiel and her teacher’s metronome, the stages on which she’d danced—the Grimms' Tales and the cuckoo clock, the kid gloves and the dainty suede boots, the thick carved headboard of her childhood bed with its scenes of villagers sleeping. (p. 104)

  This idealized, fairytale evocation of pre-war Germany would seem odd in any circumstance. The fact that Brunhilde herself, with her very visible genetic abnormality, would most likely have found herself among the Nazis' first victims, makes it even more so. Similarly, towards the end of Part One, Dr Show tells Bernie the story of his life, his glorious past as a magician on the European carnival scene:

  "Europeans have a flair for spectacle, you see. When I arrived, my notions of theatre came primarily from the vaudeville houses of my youth. But in Europe, theatre is everywhere. Mimes perform on street corners, puppet theatres dot the marketplace, and Shakespeare’s words echo in the public square. . . . I first visited London and the British Isles, then travelled onto the continent. In the Basque country I joined a clan of gypsies, posing as a marriageable suitor for their daughter." (p. 133)

  This feels to me more like "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" than 1920s Europe under hyper-inflation. Aside from a passing reference to Tod Browning, there is nothing in Part One of the novel that acknowledges that Goldenland Past Dark is supposed to be a narrative of the modern era, and what it reminds me of most of all is the sepia-tinted, inevitably nostalgic atmosphere of the widely enjoyed HBO TV series Carnivàle. There is much that is attractive in such nostalgia, perhaps, but for me it is an attractiveness that appears too solidly derivative.

  The second half of the novel feels rather different, and it would seem it is here that Smith finally becomes alive to the possibilities of her subject matter. As calamity follows calamity, Dr Show's circus succumbs to the powers of entropy and when a larger, more successful circus shows up in town at the end of Part One, Bernie and Nepenthe and Show's other remaining performers accept the inevitable and defect. Part Two of the novel opens some five years later. Bernie is now a successful clown, well paid and with his own traveling compartment which he shares with Nepenthe. Nepenthe is also successful, one of the chief attractions in the Parliament of Freaks. But it's not just the characters' fortunes that have changed. The texture of time itself seems to have altered. The high romanticism and sepia-tinted shadows are gone. Here at last are the brash colors and moral freedoms of the 1960s. The new circus is a business like any other, and its performers ply their wares with a determined professionalism and the worldly cynicism to match:

  There were no children here. These performers got divorced, cashed their paycheques, talked about joining the army or quitting the sauce or going back to school. They visited the doctor, an old man who'd once botched a nose job and now worked out of a seedy bunk with a 1958 calendar on the wall and a trash can full of bloody gauze; they went to the funeral for the guy from the motorcycle cage, who’d died not from a burst tyre but from diabetes. Even on sunny days, walking around this circus gave Webern the feeling of being inside a thin grey cloud. (p. 150)

  The atmosphere here has a raunchy reality that I found infinitely preferable to the idealized melancholy of the first half. Freed from its too-familiar backdrop, the characterization also acquires more clarity and sense of purpose. All the more pity then that these positive developments are once again stymied by the author's mishandling of plot. No sooner do we begin to enjoy the banter and rattle of coinage on clown alley than we are sent off on a pilgrimage to visit Bernie's dying grandmother. We've had hints of Bernie's troubled past before—his accident, his mother's post-natal depression and premature death, the reign of terror exerted over him by his weird twin sisters. Part Two of the novel, it now transpires, will not be a circus story after all, so much as a series of revelations about the circumstances that brought Bernie to run away with the circus in the first place. As a narrative choice this need not have been a problem—only here it is, because the story has been bifurcated too much already. One particularly odd revelation has to do with Bernie's name. As his grandmother explains, Bernie's father Raymond has not been entirely honest about his past, specifically the role he played as an American soldier in Germany in the aftermath of World War Two:

  "Your father wasn’t a war hero. . . . He was a fry cook in the mess hall. . . . Raymond took an assignment with the military police to catch some local toughs, men in the black market. He wanted a story to take home with him, I expect. . . . From what I understand, he was told to wait outside for trouble. That boy never could handle a weapon. When a stranger walked out, he shot without seeing. The man died on the spot. The worst of it was though, the man was a professor—wrote music—had nothing to do with the black market at all. Raymond was torn up, of course. . . . He named you after the man he’d killed. He believed you were his last chance to make right." (pp. 186-7)

  Any reader with an interest in the history of twentieth-century classical music will already have taken note of Bernie's full first name. They will probably know also that one of the fathers of twelve-tone music, the Austrian composer Anton Webern, was indeed killed by a single bullet in a case of mistaken identity by a US army cook named Raymond Bell. (The real Raymond Bell took to drink through remorse at his action and died, as a result of his alcoholism, in 1955.) Smith clearly has an interest in classical music—a writer doesn't name her characters Webern and Schoenberg through idle chance. Why she has taken the decision to introduce this theme, yet failed utterly to develop it, or even to let readers who don't happen to be acquainted with Webern or his music know who Bernie is in fact named after, is not so much a mystery as further evidence of a muddled approach to story.

  I also found that the very strangeness of Bernie's family—Bo-Bo the raccoon-eating grandmother, Willow and Billow the crazy evangelical twins, Marzipan the all-but-talking chimpanzee—worked against the novel as it failed to provide a clear contrast with Bernie's life in the circus. If anything, his home life is the freak show. In Wags, the tiny golden-haired boy who no one else can see, I found echoes of Jonathan Carroll's Mr Fiddlehead from A Child Across the Sky (1989), but one of the chief glories of Carroll is his ability to depict a benignly quotidian reality which is then gradually transformed or darkened towards the fantastic. In Goldenland Past Dark, everything is weird, everything is whimsy. As readers we are constantly left wondering what we supposed to be taking note of, and what is just stage dressing.

  Which is why I find it difficult to summarize, in the end, what Goldenland Past Dark is chiefly about. Is it the withering away of the old ways, the conflict between pre-war and post-war sensibilities, a revelation of family secrets, or the effects of changing fortunes on personal relationships? It is ostensibly about all these things, and while any one of them might have been enough to carry the novel forward, Smith's attempt to bring all of them together might leave even the most patient reader feeling frustrated. The fact that the story as such only begins halfway through the novel means it’s all too little, too late in any case. My personal feeling is that Part One of the novel, with its overused tropes and idealized Mitteleuropa, is mostly redundant, and that Smith would probably have done well to substantially cut it, or even to dispense with it entirely. The rationale for what is essentially a novella-length prologue—Doctor Show’s obsession with a derelict automated amusement park called Goldenland—is, like the subplot involving Raymond Bell and Anton Webern, barely developed at all and except for one later mention which seems to exist chiefly so that the novel's title can be quoted within the body of the text, the theme never recurs. In terms of plot it is entirely irrelevant. For this reader at least, a leaner, more focused novel about Bernie Bell and the latter days of circus would undoubtedly have provided greater overall satisfaction.

  The writing though is never less than competent, and in its richly textured tapestry of scents, sights, and sounds it is frequently much more than that. Certain passages towards the end in which Bernie relives his relationship with the now absent Nepenthe are genuinely moving and insightful. There is considerable skill here, and even more feeling, and in the end how much you enjoy this novel may simply come down to how many circus novels you have already read. If this is your first, you will probably love it and believe me churlish for not loving it equally. If it happens to be your fifth or sixth, you might feel somewhat less enamored of the enterprise.

  Chandler Klang Smith is clearly a writer of promise, with an eloquent and poetic imagination and a feel for language that more than matches it. Now that she has her circus novel out of her system, I will wait with interest and optimism to see what she has in store for us next time around.

  Nina Allan’s stories have appeared in Best Horror of the Year #2, Year's Best SF #28, and The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2012. Her story cycle The Silver Wind was published by Eibonvale Press in 2011, and her most recent book, Stardust, is available from PS Publishing. Nina's website is at www.ninaallan.co.uk. She lives and works in Hastings, East Sussex.

  © Copyright 2013 Nina Allan
  About Nina Allan
  Nina Allan's stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year #6, The Year's Best Science Fiction #33, and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women. Her novella Spin, a science fictional re-imagining of the Arachne myth, won the BSFA Award in 2014, and her story-cycle The Silver Wind was awarded the Grand Prix de L'Imaginaire in the same year. Her debut novel The Race was a finalist for the 2015 BSFA Award, the Kitschies Red Tentacle, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her second novel The Rift was published in 2017 by Titan Books. Nina lives and works on the Isle of Bute in Western Scotland. Find her blog, The Spider's House, at www.ninaallan.co.uk.
  No

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-927469-35-4
  Word count: 186

  Goldenland Past Dark
  Chandler Klang Smith. ChiZine (Diamond, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (300p) ISBN 978-1-927469-35-4
  Smith’s debut showcases a cornucopia of memorably weird personalities in a handful of vivid moments. Dr. Schoenberg’s shabby little traveling show includes Webern Bell, a 15-year-old, four-foot-tall humpbacked clown; Brunhilde, a bearded lady who still mourns the destruction of Dresden; and Nepenthe, a lizard-skinned beauty who may be an heiress. As the novel opens, they are in a bright yellow Cadillac, fleeing from a vengeful gypsy through a rainy night. Unfortunately, before anything hinted at or described in that opener is resolved, most of these painstakingly actualized characters leave or die. Soon all that’s left are Webern’s elaborate dreams of ever-more-intricate performances and memories of his warped childhood. All of this is utterly fantastic and wonderful, and it takes quite some time to realize that no actual story is developing. Readers who get deeply into the characters and visuals may find they don’t even mind the lack of structure or resolution. Agent: Joy Tutela, the David Black Literary Agency. (Mar.)

• My Bookish Ways
  http://www.mybookishways.com/2013/04/interview-chandler-klang-smith-author-of-goldenland-past-dark.html
  Word count: 1054

  Interview: Chandler Klang Smith, author of Goldenland Past Dark
  Kristin April 3, 2013Fantasy, Interviews

  Chandler Klang Smith’s new novel, Goldenland Past Dark, just came out in March from ChiZine, and she was kind enough to answer some question about the book, and much more! Please welcome Chandler to the blog!

  Chandler_high-res_01 (2)Chandler, your new novel, Goldenland Past Dark, is about a circus performer who is damaged physically and psychologically, and takes solace in his imagination. Will you tell us a bit more about Webern Bell, the novel, and what inspired you to write it?
  Of all the characters I’ve ever written about, Webern Bell is probably closest to my heart. Before embarking on this novel, I actually wrote a series of linked short stories about his childhood, starting even before the fall from the treehouse that leaves him hunchbacked and stunted. So he was someone who grew up, from infancy to adulthood, in my imagination, and that gave me access to a lot of information about him – his likes and dislikes, his fears and hopes – that I was able to draw from when putting him into the various scenarios that make up this book.

  I suppose I was attracted to Webern as a character because, like me, he’s someone who makes sense of experiences and emotions in his life by filtering them through his imagination, and usually translating them into art (in his case, his clown routines in the circus). This makes him a talented and dedicated performer, but it also distances him from reality at even the best of times. I wanted to explore the potentially dark consequences of that. When his life takes a turn for the worse, he deals with heartbreak, grief, and professional betrayal by immersing himself so completely in his fantasies, he might never find his way back out.

  I read that you wanted to write from a very early age. What’s one of the first things you can remember writing?
  Hmm – probably the earliest thing I remember writing would be a script for a puppet show. When I was very young, I wanted to be a Muppeteer, so I’d sew sock puppets and perform with them for my very tolerant parents.

  Goldenland_FINAL_(Sept-30-2012) (2)Why do you think carnivals, the circus, and tarnished Americana capture our imaginations so fully? Why do they capture your imagination?
  Traveling shows suggest another way of life running parallel to the conventional workaday world most of us inhabit – I think that’s why there’s a whole mythos of running away to join the circus. And it makes it an especially appealing realm to escape to through the pages of a book.

  Who, or what, have been some of the biggest influences on your writing?
  Steven Millhauser was easily the biggest influence on this novel. I’ve read and love almost all of his work, and I thought a lot about stories of his like “The Knife Thrower,” “The Barnum Museum,” “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” “Paradise Park,” “In the Penny Arcade,” and “August Eschenberg” (just to name a handful off the top of my head) when I was trying to depict the carnivalesque settings and performances in the novel. Millhauser has an uncanny ability to render visual images in the mind’s eye, to move the reader through a space or a character through the motions of an act with absolute precision, and that’s what makes his work utterly convincing even when it makes a leap into the fantastical. I’d also give shout-outs to Angela Carter, whose Nights at the Circus and The Magic Toyshop cranked my imagination into overdrive, and Shirley Jackson, whose characters, like Webern, often tend to be passive, dreamy people who are a little too susceptible to the dark forces of their own subconscious minds.

  The book I’m writing now is more overtly postmodern in its style, so lately I’ve been reading (and rereading) a lot of Thomas Pynchon, Stephen Wright, Jonathan Lethem, and Donald Barthelme.

  What would you like to see readers take away from Goldenland Past Dark?
  Really, I’m just curious to hear what people think – even if they don’t like it! Once a book’s out in the world, it doesn’t really belong to the author anymore.

  If you could experience one novel again for the very first time, which one would it be?
  Hmm – I can think of a few possible answers, but I guess today I’d say Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. It consists of two intertwined narratives, and there’s startling twist at the end, when the reader finds out how they’re connected. It would be fun to experience the shock and aesthetic satisfaction of discovering that all over again.

  What’s one piece of advice that you would give to struggling writers?
  Don’t be so focused on publication. Focus single-mindedly on making the work whatever you want it to be. I realize that, coming from someone who just had a book come out, this sounds obnoxious. But I feel like I wasted a lot of time over the years waiting for external validation, as if it would somehow magically make all my doubts and insecurities disappear. And now I know that it really, really doesn’t. In the end, the only thing that makes this worthwhile is creating something you’re truly, deeply proud of.

  When you’re not writing, how do you like to spend your free time?
  I like off-off-Broadway theater and stand-up comedy a lot, and I enjoy going to art museums – I’m an especially big fan of surrealism and outsider art. I feel lucky to live in New York City, where I have access to a lot of this stuff on a regular basis.

  What’s next for you?
  I’m working on another novel, this one about a futuristic, parallel universe version of New York City that’s under constant attack from dragons. You can read an excerpt from it here.
  Keep up with Chandler: Website | Publisher page

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/01/25/579255006/regency-romance-crashes-into-dragon-filled-dystopia-in-the-sky-is-yours
  Word count: 928

  Regency Romance Crashes Into Dragon-Filled Dystopia In 'The Sky Is Yours'
  January 25, 20187:00 AM ET
  Jason Heller.

  Jason Heller
  The Sky Is Yours
  The Sky Is Yours

  by Chandler Klang Smith

  Hardcover, 464
  purchase

  Dragons, thanks to Game of Thrones, are cool again. But for many of us, dragons never stopped being cool. Even during the long stretches where the mainstream has largely ignored these awesome, ancient lizards of genre fiction, authors from Lucius Shepard to Robin Hobb to Naomi Novik have kept dragon lore alive, radically reinventing the scaly beasts along the way. On the considerable merits of her new novel, The Sky Is Yours, Chandler Klang Smith should be added to that list — although it would be a mistake to think that dragons are the book's bread and butter. They're there, of course; specifically, two ominous dragons relentlessly circle The Sky Is Yours' setting, a futuristic and dystopian city known as Empire Island. Smith, however, has even vaster monsters on her radar.

  Empire Island is "an island full of eyes," a place where the populace nervously scans the skies for the yellow and green dragons that occasionally rain fire and death from above. It vaguely resembles New York City in geography and size, only it's been ravaged and divided by catastrophe. The rich live in regal, decadent splendor behind high walls, while the poor scavenge the smoldering waste beyond — and criminals are penned in an enclave called Torchtown that just so happens to be the most vulnerable to the dragons. Technology, at first glance, seems advanced beyond our own in a pulpy sci-fi kind of way, but it turns out to be eerily similar to our present. People conduct LookyChats on a device called the LookyGlass, while the Toob pacifies the masses with reality-show froth such as Late Capitalism's Royalty.

  18-year-old Duncan Humphrey Ripple V is a former star of Late Capitalism's Royalty, and just as vapid and libertine as that requires. On the eve of his arranged marriage to Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg, Ripple meets a teenaged urchin named Abby — short for Abracadabra — with whom he becomes smitten. This Regency-romance setup clashes deliriously with the sci-fi and fantasy elements of the book, and it's clear that's exactly what Smith intends. Rather than a genre mash-up, this is a genre car crash: kinetic, explosive, and uproariously messy. That mad energy is infectious, especially as these three uneasy allies are forced to embark on a quest into the squalid, perilous underbelly of Empire Island, where drug designers, pizza delivery drivers, resigned firefighters, and members of dragon cults circulate in a teeming social osmosis across the many barriers of the city — all while keeping fearful eyes on the fire from the sky.
  Why Teens Find The End Of The World So Appealing
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  Why Teens Find The End Of The World So Appealing
  'The Book Of Joan' Is A Dizzying, Dystopian Genre Mashup
  Book Reviews
  'The Book Of Joan' Is A Dizzying, Dystopian Genre Mashup

  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 — from "sewer gondoliers" to "daydream spire-domes like the shells of snails who feed at the secret hot vents of the sea."

  The descent-into-hell plotline is splashed out in exaggerated gestures and bright, bold strokes; its raw energy rattles. Smith's broken, at times detestable characters — including a rich and colorful supporting cast — manage to shine amid a constant barrage of wonders and grotesqueries, eking out depth and redemption as the city seems intent on swallowing them whole. Like Lev Grossman's The Magicians and Charlie Jane Anders' All the Birds in the Sky before it, 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.

  Rather than a genre mash-up, this is a genre car crash: kinetic, explosive, and uproariously messy.

  Thankfully, the book's whopping, ostensibly on-the-nose symbolism — that is, deadly dragons in the sky over the city — avoids the obvious route. Rather than lapsing into some late-for-the party, post-9/11 allegory, Smith imbues her creatures with far more mystery and ambiguity, all while deftly ensuring that their formidable shadows never blot out her characters. The true monsters of The Sky Is Yours are more eerily familiar: consumerism, gentrification, disparity, and the ways cities can both liberate and dehumanize. There are dragons, but there are no Daenerys Targaryens, at least not exactly; this is a tale told on a much less heroic scale, even when the novel's rapturous climax ties the dragons' future to the fate of a character with a staggering inheritance.

  The Sky Is Yours is a book about birthrights and the lack thereof, about the uncounted costs of survival and sacrifice. Rather than overstuffed, it's stuffed just enough; its dimensions are mythic, archetypal, and resonant, just like dragons themselves.

  Jason Heller is a Hugo Award-winning editor and author of the forthcoming book Strange Stars (Melville House). Twitter: @jason_m_heller.

• Medium
  https://medium.com/@zachary_houle/a-review-of-chandler-klang-smiths-the-sky-is-yours-2aa47487c0f2
  Word count: 1077

  A Review of Chandler Klang Smith’s “The Sky Is Yours”
  A Bend In Reality
  “The Sky Is Yours” Book Cover

  Genre bending novels used to be my thing — after all, before finding out that he was a total arse, I used to love Jonathan Lethem’s early novels. So when a book that describes itself as a cross between Blade Runner and Super Sad True Love Story comes along, I had to jump at the chance to read it. That novel is Chandler Klang Smith’s The Sky Is Yours, and, boy, does it bend genres. It is equal parts science fiction and fantasy, blended with fairy tales and gangster novels and quite possibly even more. (Romance?) The novel is ambitious, too, as it features three young protagonists that essentially get equal billing.

  The novel starts with the impending marriage between Duncan Ripple, an 18-year-old geek and former reality TV star, and Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg, (also known as Swanny) a young lady who grows so many teeth constantly inside her mouth (and body as it turns out) that she has a dentist on call to help fix her gums. However, before the wedding, Duncan — travelling to meet his future wife in an air car — crashes into two dragons that circle the city state he lives in. He falls to an island full of trash where he is rescued by a feral young woman named Abracadabra, or Abby for short. Duncan falls in love with Abby, and that sets off complications that resonate throughout the entire novel.

  Needless to say, there’s a lot going on with this book, and I’ve only just sketched out the very first 10th of it or so, which means that readers will probably not be very bored — though there are some slow spots here and there. I didn’t know until I finished reading this book that Chandler Klang Smith was a woman, and I say that because she gets the dodderheadded Duncan Ripple down right — right down to the fantasy porn collection that he harbours. Indeed, the world these characters inhabit is quite colourful. Your imagination will be working triple overtime while reading this book.

  Alas — and there is an alas — there’s a major flaw with The Sky Is Yours. The author seems to hold her characters in contempt, which means that they are not very likable. Granted, the characters grow and mature as the novel wears on, which is a relief, but, at the outset, Duncan and Swanny are spoiled little brats as are their extended family members. It’s really hard to dig into this book because the characters are just so entitled and irritating. That might be part of the book’s overall theme, but, still, it makes for a rather tough slog.

  The best science fiction doesn’t necessarily predict the future but works as an analogy for how things are now. To that end, I wasn’t really sure what the book was all about. Duncan could be seen as a Trump-like figure, except he’s not callous enough, and that’s where the comparisons to our current living environment seems to end. I’m not sure who Swanny represents, and I’m definitely not sure what Abby means to mirror. Even the setting — a burned out cityscape that seems to double for New York City — isn’t quite clear as an analogy because the downtown core is called Torchtown and that’s where all of the criminals are sent to live. I don’t know how things are currently in New York for sure, but I thought that the rundown boroughs have been significantly cleaned up since the high crime of the ’70s and ‘80s.

  Still, if you take the book for what it is — a mashed up fairy tale — it does have its pleasures and its joys. The crew eventually encounters a vicious drug dealer named Sharkey, who may just be the best character of the book. He wheedles and deals with his clientele, and harbours secrets from the main characters that would ruin him if they were to find out. When Sharkey’s on the scene, the book is quite magical, because he’s so violent and unpredictable. True, he’s not very likable either, in a sense, based on his occupation and personality, but following him is a pleasure.

  The Sky Is Yours has another problem, and that is that it feels somewhat stitched together and made up as the author went along. This does introduce the odd plot hole or two. For instance, I don’t think it’s really explained how Sharkey can venture out in a limo beyond Torchtown, even if it isn’t really defended well. And since its occupants have a means for getting out, why is it that they choose to stay and not leave? The book isn’t very clear on this. It’s probably best that you don’t think too deeply about this novel, as you might run your brain up in knots.

  In the end, The Sky Is Yours is a pleasant enough book that is coming out in the dead of winter — normally a dull time in the book publishing world. It reminded me somewhat of Kristopher Jasma’s Why We Came to The City in places, at least in tone not content. I’m not so sure that the book is very Blade Runner-esque, except in how it treats the cityscape as a triumph of production design, but for those who like their stories to be mashed like potatoes, there is enough grist here to really bite into. You may find the first half of the book to be somewhat grating, as I did, but stick with it as the characters change and grow up to a degree, which means you’ll eventually get to places that are slightly more edifying. But as to what The Sky Is Yours is actually trying to say, it beats the heck out of me. Still, this book is worth a look for the curious.

  Chandler Klang Smith’s The Sky Is Yours will be published by Crown / Hogarth on January 23, 2018.

  Of course, if you like what you see, please recommend this piece (click on the clapping hands icon below) and share it with your followers.

• Open Letters Review
  https://openlettersreview.com/open-letters-review/the-sky-is-yours-by-chandler-klang-smith
  Word count: 662

  The Sky is Yours
  Chandler Klang Smith
  Hogarth, 2018
  The Sky is Yours by Chandler Klang Smith.jpg

  “Even before the dragons came, our city was crumbling,” Chandler Klang Smith's richly impressive debut The Sky is Yours begins. “It was as though this place was a dream we'd dreamed together, a dream gone to tatters in the morning light.”

  The opening note will be suggestive to readers of China Mieville's New Crobuzon novels, or the great Viriconium novels of M. John Harrison, in which the Evening Cultures are likewise tattered dreams from which their inhabitants can't awaken. And the opening note is followed immediately by exactly the kind of extended dystopian surreality that both Mieville and Harrison (and predecessors like Jack Vance) make look so easy:

  Dull-eyed humans drifted past boarded storefronts, walking all kinds of animals on leashes. Vultures perched on sick trees in the park. A man clad in garbage bags sang his song in the middle of a bleak avenue as a single taxi sputtered past. Young girls dressed as if for the grave in Sunday dresses and secondhand shoes. Couches appeared on the curbs, were joined there by beds and rugs and tables; whole rooms assembled piece by piece, and the shadows of people occupied these rooms. It became the fashion to speak of oneself in the past tense. Wine flowed from dusty casks into dusty glasses. Chaw regained its popularity; dream-candy, some called it, mutant psychotropic moss mashed up with molasses and additives whose names we'd never known. We chewed it up and spat it out. Neon words went dark, leaving orphaned letters behind. Sometimes we heard laughter in our unfinished apartment complexes, though no one else was renting the units on our floor. We lived in a ruin.

  The ruin that is the setting for The Sky is Yours may not be the handiwork of the two dragons that rule its sky and terrorize its city, but they certainly haven't helped matters any. Their specter haunts the book's many characters, from wheelchair-bound crackpot Osmond to Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg, the book's standout character, or Duncan Humphrey Ripple V, the young son of the city's hyper-monied upper crust, whose initial flying-car mishap sets what amounts to the book's main plot in motion.

  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, as in the moment where a mother is searching for daughter:

  Pippi kicks open the door to the kitchen and enters the room handgun first. But she's alone. There's no sound but the metallic, faintly poisonous plink of a leaky faucet into the stainless-steel sink. Pippi flips on the lights, which buzz and fizzle themselves awake as she stealths across the tile. She swings open the door to the walk-in icebox; the light inside is already on. A mostly empty carton of butter macaroon frozen custard lies on the floor beside a bottle of caramel topping and a tipped-over jar sticky with red juice. Pippi picks it up and checks the label. Just as she suspected: maraschino.

  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.

  Steve Donoghue was a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and the American Conservative. He writes regularly for the National, the Washington Post, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

• Entertainment Weekly
  http://ew.com/books/2018/02/23/chandler-klang-smith-sky-is-yours/
  Word count: 1036

  The Sky Is Yours author Chandler Klang Smith answers our burning questions
  Seija Rankin February 23, 2018 AT 09:00 AM EST

  The publishing world is often hesitant to use hyperbole when describing books and authors — calling someone a wunderkind, for example, can be tenuous. But there’s no question that Chandler Klang Smith is one of the brightest (and most well-spoken) young authors to come around in a long time. She is also a total whiz at creating fascinating imaginary worlds.

  Her debut novel, The Sky Is Yours, hit shelves in January and it has been widely hailed as one of the most creative fantasy titles of late. The story takes place in the year 301970 (yes, you read that right), when the world is a very exaggerated version of what we know today: The wealthy live in houses the size of entire neighborhoods, pets are actually animal-species hybrids, and there just so happen to be dragons patrolling the skyline. The main character, Duncan, is attempting to navigate growing up as an heir to one of the wealthiest families when he winds up having to escape to the seediest part of town.

  The whole thing is fabulously insane — our own critic described it as “a work of fiction beholden to no rules” — so it’s no question that the author behind the novel is immensely witty and creative. Below, she answers EW’s burning questions and lets us in on her process.

  ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What is the first thing — ever — that you remember writing?
  CHANDLER KLANG SMITH: In the second grade, I wrote and illustrated a collection of stories with a title page screaming MY BIG BOOK, each letter outlined in a hot pink bubble. The first story was about a “bunny dragon” who meets a sad child. They, of course, become friends “emedeetly.” Clearly, I have never been afraid of ambitious, sprawling projects, or of straining the limits of my vocabulary. Plus, author trademark? Dragons.

  What is the last book that made you cry?
  Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle. Without giving too much away, that novel centers on a character who irrevocably changed the course of his life with a single action. The whole book circles around and around why he did it. But instead of answering that question, the book ultimately dives into the center of the vortex it’s created, into the negative space of that question, and you’re left wondering as a reader if any of us really understand any of the things we do. It gutted me, honestly.

  What is your favorite part of The Sky Is Yours?
  My favorite chapter might be the one that ends Part II. No spoilers, but it involves sex, drugs, fireworks, and a one-eyed hooch-drinking ghost cat.
  Eric Taxier; Crown/Archetype

  Which book is at the top of your current To-Read list?
  I’ve been wanting to check out Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties since before it was released, so I’m eager to finally dig into that. I heard her read her incredible story “Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead” (not in the collection, unfortunately!) at an event in Brooklyn in 2015 and was totally dazzled.

  Where do you write?
  Usually in my living room, either on my big red couch or my comfy purple velvet armchair. I don’t like to sit at a desk — that makes writing feel too much like work!

  What was the hardest plot point or character to write in this book?
  Also in Part II, one of my three protagonists — the playboy scion of the city’s wealthiest family (and an all-around toxic bro), who used to star in his own reality show — teams up with a mysterious, shadowy figure in a gas mask, introduced only as “Leather Lungs,” to fight fires in the city. It took me the longest time to hammer out Leather Lungs’ character arc and decide what secrets he was keeping. But in the end, some of the most intense action and imagery of the novel arose out of this section. There’s even an ax battle!

  Which book made you a forever reader?
  Probably Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Before I was old enough to read, my mom would read those to me. I still remember laughing so hard I was crying at her rendition of the Mock Turtle’s song: “Soo–oop of the e–e–evening, Beautiful, beauti–FUL SOUP!”

  Pick a GIF that you think, in this moment, best describes you.

  Terry Gilliam’s Brazil was a huge influence on The Sky Is Yours, but this image kind of captures my writing process too: the feeling of soaring, unfettered, through the realms of the imagination, only to be suddenly thwarted by an unexpected obstacle.

  What is a snack you couldn’t write without?
  I don’t snack a lot when I’m writing; I’m so into food that it would be distracting. But I do bake as a hobby, and I find that when I’m working on a recipe, it takes me out of my own head and into the physical world in a way that can free up my writing process. Then I get to reward myself with a homemade donut when I actually produce some words!

  If you could change one thing about any of your books what would it be?
  I’m constantly learning new things, but I don’t have a strong impulse to go back and tinker with something that’s already out in the world. Mostly I just wish I could write new stuff faster. I’m happiest when I’m flinging myself headlong into a story, but it takes me quite a while to get into that zone.

  Write a movie poster tagline for your book.
  If the title is still The Sky Is Yours, the tagline would have to be, “But the world is on fire.”

• SFF World
  https://www.sffworld.com/2018/02/the-sky-is-yours-by-chandler-klang-smith/
  Word count: 1186

  THE SKY IS YOURS by Chandler Klang Smith
  Rob B February 6, 2018 2 Comments

  Dragons flying in the sky, an arranged marriage between two upper class youths, a broken city… one might be forgiven for thinking The Sky is Yours is a high fantasy novel given those genre tropes. With the broken, decadent city (Empire Island) littered with old technology of a past that could be our future, one of the youths the former star of a “Toob” program, and the dragons potentially manufactured machines, a more complex perspective of Chandler Klang Smith’s novel comes to light shifting this into Science Fiction or perhaps a melding of the genres.

  A sprawling, genre-defying epic set in a dystopian metropolis plagued by dragons, this debut about what it’s like to be young in a very old world is pure storytelling pleasure

  In the burned-out, futuristic city of Empire Island, three young people navigate a crumbling metropolis constantly under threat from a pair of dragons that circle the skies. When violence strikes, reality star Duncan Humphrey Ripple V, the spoiled scion of the metropolis’ last dynasty; Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg, his tempestuous, death-obsessed betrothed; and Abby, a feral beauty he discovered tossed out with the trash; are forced to flee everything they’ve ever known. As they wander toward the scalded heart of the city, they face fire, conspiracy, mayhem, unholy drugs, dragon-worshippers, and the monsters lurking inside themselves. In this bombshell of a novel, Chandler Klang Smith has imagined an unimaginable world: scathingly clever and gorgeously strange, The Sky Is Yours is at once faraway and disturbingly familiar, its singular chaos grounded in the universal realities of love, family, and the deeply human desire to survive at all costs.

  The Sky Is Yours is incredibly cinematic, bawdy, rollicking, hilarious, and utterly unforgettable, a debut that readers who loved Cloud Atlas, Super Sad True Love Story, and Blade Runner will adore.

  Duncan Humphrey Ripple IV is one of the protagonists of the novel, his father arranges a marriage between Duncan and the Baroness Swan “Swanny” Lenore Dahlberg. On the day before their marriage, Duncan’s personal flyer crashes into a junk heap nearly killing him, but allowing Duncan to save a strange waif named Abby, who Duncan immediately “seduces.” Or rather, Duncan takes advantage of her and makes her little more than a sex object. Thus, we have our three main characters and a love triangle.

  To say that Swan and Duncan don’t like each other is an understatement, and Duncan’s “girlfriend” Abby is just the tip of the iceberg of that shared disdain. Neither character is excited about the marriage proposition and even less so after they first meet. Unfortunately, the three characters are forced out of the Ripple home shortly after Duncan and Swanny’s marriage contract is signed and the three characters must survive on their own in the less than savory landscape of Empire Island. There’s a sense of decadence about everything, that society has peaked and is on a decline, with much of Empire City blaming the Dragons appearance a few decades prior to the novel for the downswing in culture and society.

  Smith has constructed an interesting world here on the surface, but as the world and plot begin to intertwine and reveal themselves, many of those elements begin to show as familiar genre tropes/elements. Unfortunately, the more the genre elements came out, the only thing that seemed to hold the novel together was a sneer of disdain. That is, I felt like the entire novel was contemptuously sneering at SFF rather than of embracing the joys of the genre. Which leads to the next point.

  The most frustrating aspect of the novel; however, were the characters. I found the two main characters, Swan and Duncan, annoying and unlikeable on nearly every level and filled with an extremely high level of undeserved and unearned, expected privilege. Duncan talks and acts like a spoiled, misogynistic twit and Swan comes across like a brat who deserves whatever she wants because she wants it.

  Unlikeable characters are important to many novels and not every character necessarily needs to be likeable, but when the two main characters have very little redeeming value, it is difficult to enjoy the novel which features them. At times, though, Smith did a good job of building up sympathy for Swan’s plight and some of her interactions with Duncan. Some unpleasant things happened to her, that no matter how annoying of a character she was, were undeserved. Despite that sympathy, I still found her largely an unlikeable character. I

  There were also quite a few structural shifts, from “typewritten instructions” replacing the narrative flow, to part of the narrative being taken over by a script, to a multi-page Visio flowchart. One of these “clever” devices may have been interesting, but the multiple tricks only added to my growing frustration with the novel and made it more of a self-indulgent exercise that wanted to prove how clever it was rather than tell a good story with a balanced cast of characters. I’m not sure what the novel is trying to say other than ‘everything is shit.’

  On the plus side, there’s a great deal of chaotic energy in the novel and a strong narrative drive that kept pulling me forward despite my strong dislike for the characters. I also found the secondary character of Sharkey the most interesting character in the book. He’s an old, mobster-drug maker who becomes quite prominent about halfway through the book. He’s quite unpleasant himself, but there is more depth to who he is and there’s just more weight to the character than Swan, Duncan, or Abby. I found Abby more interesting towards the latter third of the novel as the narrative seemed to pay more attention to her, but by that point, I just wanted the novel to end.

  As I reached the halfway point of the novel, I began to wonder if it was just me who was having these issues with The Sky is Yours. Apparently, I am in the minority because there are quite a few 4- and 5-star reviews on goodreads and some prominent genre names have favorably blurbed the book. In those blurbs/reviews, I saw quite a few positive comments about the humor of the book, which just proves that humor is subjective because I didn’t find anything at all funny.

  Bottom line, for me, The Sky is Yours is a novel that points at the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy with disdain and holds its characters in contempt rather than embracing the fun elements of SFF and the potential of SFF.

  Unfortunately, this isn’t a book I can recommend on any level.

  Published by Hogarth (An imprint of Crown, part of Penguin Random House)
  Hardcover January 2018
  Review copy courtesy of the publisher

• Fantasy Literature
  http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/the-sky-is-yours/
  Word count: 1941

  The Sky is Yours: I wrestled with this literary SF novel

  Readers’ average rating:

  The Sky is Yours by Chandler Klang SmithThe Sky is Yours by Chandler Klang Smith science fiction book reviewsThe Sky is Yours by Chandler Klang Smith

  I wrestled with this review for Chandler Klang Smith’s 2018 novel The Sky is Yours from the first paragraph. I wanted to refer to it as a “zeitgeist novel.” After I wrote that, I glanced at Wikipedia and decided that, as Inigo Montoya says to the Sicilian in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” So, I’ve decided that The Sky is Yours is not a zeitgeist novel. It’s more self-conscious than that. It is a novel of the zeitgeist, using a future-dystopia to comment on the values, concerns and fears of modern living.

  The Sky is Yours is about the future the way William Gibson’s SPRAWL trilogy, which captured the 1980s is a way no other books did, was about the future. The Sky is Yours is intentionally literary. The opening line of the book, “This is a story of what it is to be young in a very old world,” tells you what you need to know: that this story intends to be a story.

  In a future city, Empire Island, that looks a lot like New York, twin dragons fly overhead, setting various buildings on fire in a way that seems, at first, to be random. The dragons emerged from the ocean fifty years earlier. No one has been able to kill them or control them. They are part of daily life now. The Sky is Yours follows not the dragons but three young people living their lives in or near the city. Duncan Humphrey Ripple V is eighteen, heir to a fortune, and the former star of the reality streaming-content product called Late Capitalism’s Royalty. Ripple is coddled, entitled and not very smart. While he is out flying around in his personal aircraft, a blow from a dragon’s tail crashes him on an artificial island made of trash, where he meets the feral girl Abby. It’s lust at first sight, and when Ripple is rescued he brings Abby with him. This is awkward, since his arranged-marriage bride Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg is due to arrive with her mother in a few days. These three young people, Swanny, Ripple and Abby, form the core of a book centered largely in Empire Island.

  I not only wrestled with this review, I wrestled with this book too. I didn’t know exactly what kind of story this was at first, and the story would not let me in, until I realized that this is not a literal futuristic dystopia. This is a literary exercise about life in the US now.

  It’s a story about privilege, social and economic inequity, spelled out in the simplest way. People who don’t have money are imperiled by random dragon attacks. They struggle to find food or maintain power to their houses. The safest way to travel is on boats through the sewers. The plutocrats, like the Ripple clan, live in houses high enough that the dragons don’t attack. They want for nothing. They are bored and boring. Ripple has a primate-canine hybrid pet, and he thinks of Abby as a pet too. Swanny, who was raised outside the city, is not as wealthy as Ripple, but she is far smarter than Ripple, which is part of the reason she was chosen as his bride.

  Swanny is a Baroness, but there is no peerage or aristocracy in this world. Her title isn’t explained, just as it’s never explained why some governmental military agency didn’t try to contain the dragons. The sense of The Sky is Yours is that the people of Empire Island are on their own. This is a novel of the zeitgeist. People feel that they are on their own in the face of unemployment, loss of health care and natural catastrophes. Empire Island isn’t meant to be a real place; it’s a beautifully defined metaphor.

  Similarly, the people of Empire Island built a medium security prison, Torch Town, right in the middle of the city. Most municipalities don’t build prisons in the middle of downtown. Torch Town needs to be there, though, because Torch Town and its mobster crime lord are central to the story once it gets going.

  Smith’s prose is an amazing performance. It’s high-intensity, original, funny. A few times I felt like I was downing my second signature cocktail at a high-end lounge; not quite drunk on the words, but definitely tipsy. She has a great sense of dark humor that she uses to good effect through out the story. I love the sly digs, like “the Lipgloss Building,” and the names of all the “classic” books, like The Governor of Illinois and They Call it Criminal. I laughed when I discovered that Ripple’s father communicates with him mostly through email memos. I especially like this moment of realization that Ripple shares as he and Abby flee a home invasion.

  It’s at this moment, for the first time, that Ripple truly realizes the nature of the story that he’s in. Up until this moment, he believed himself to be the hero, if not in terms of actual bravery, at least in terms of situational positioning. The story was about him, always. Now, though, Ripple realizes what an illusion that all was, a function of clever editing in service of mindless entertainment.

  I like stories that play with textual styles of storytelling and Smith uses both a screenplay format and a game-script format in places, reminding us that Ripple, at least, thinks of life as a piece of streaming content… and also that the entire book is a performance.

  Because The Sky is Yours uses stock characters or types to unfold its story, and because the story’s focus is on this ashy, trashy, violent and vibrant city, the main characters are only slightly more than types. The handful of primary characters include the Smart Fat Girl, the Wild Child, the Magical Girl, the Mobster and even a bitter-but-perceptive wheelchair guy. Swanny is probably the best developed character in the book, or at least the most complex. Once again, clever writing, witty banter and perfect comic timing make these stock characters palatable.

  In a few places, Smith overdoes the jokes. While the mention of Ripple’s disease, “affluenza,” is funny, it gets overused later in the story. And I don’t know if it’s a clever Easter egg or hubris, or perhaps both, that allows a writer to name a musical instrument in the story after herself, but on first encounter I found it jarring. (It could be a reference to this guy, but that’s a bit of a stretch.)

  In a couple of cases, the storylines for the characters do diverge somewhat from what’s expected. While I wasn’t completely convinced by it, I liked that Swanny’s story arc veered away from the predictable at the very end. This can’t be said for Abby, whose cute, calloused feet never veer by one footstep from the path the reader anticipates from early in the story. Ripple starts off as a spoiled, stupid, clueless boy. By the end he is a clued-in, stupid man, and — and I say this with absolutely no sarcasm — that is genuine character growth. And I wasn’t entirely reading The Sky is Yours for its characters, anyway. I was reading it for ape-hounds, super-smart rats, the Lipgloss Building, The Fire Museum and a ferry system that uses the sewers.

  The dragons are both resolved and explained for approximate values of both those terms, given the world-building choices made in this book.

  Smith’s book is a little too slow in the first half, but I loved it for her prose, the strangeness of the imagery and her poisoned-blade humor. This is not a conventional dystopian story. It’s not exactly a comedy of manners, although the first half is. If you like strange, vivid prose and lots of acid-etched humor, you’ll enjoy this. If you have a sense that your world is on fire and you have to row through a sewer just to live your life, if you think that only criminals profit, the rich are vapid and uncaring, there is no one on your side, and everything you see on media sources is a well-edited sham, you will completely relate to The Sky is Yours. I am not a person who sees life that way, but I enjoy reading a book now and then that makes me wrestle with its concepts, and work to accept the book on its own terms. The Sky is Yours did that, and it was refreshing.
  Publication date: January 23, 2018. A sprawling, genre-defying epic set in a dystopian metropolis plagued by dragons, this debut about what it’s like to be young in a very old world is pure storytelling pleasure. In the burned-out, futuristic city of Empire Island, three young people navigate a crumbling metropolis constantly under threat from a pair of dragons that circle the skies. When violence strikes, reality star Duncan Humphrey Ripple V, the spoiled scion of the metropolis’ last dynasty; Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg, his tempestuous, death-obsessed betrothed; and Abby, a feral beauty he discovered tossed out with the trash; are forced to flee everything they’ve ever known. As they wander toward the scalded heart of the city, they face fire, conspiracy, mayhem, unholy drugs, dragon-worshippers, and the monsters lurking inside themselves. In this bombshell of a novel, Chandler Klang Smith has imagined an unimaginable world: scathingly clever and gorgeously strange, The Sky Is Yours is at once faraway and disturbingly familiar, its singular chaos grounded in the universal realities of love, family, and the deeply human desire to survive at all costs. The Sky Is Yours is incredibly cinematic, bawdy, rollicking, hilarious, and utterly unforgettable, a debut that readers who loved Cloud Atlas, Super Sad True Love Story, and Blade Runner will adore.

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  January 22nd, 2018. Marion Deeds´s rating: 4 | Chandler Klang Smith | Edge, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |

  MARION DEEDS, with us since March 2011, is retired from a 35-year career with county government, where she met enough interesting characters and heard enough zany stories to inspire at least two trilogies’ worth of fantasy fiction. Currently she spends part of her time working at a local used bookstore. She is an aspiring writer herself and, in the 1990s, had short fiction published in small magazines like Night Terrors, Aberrations, and in the cross-genre anthology The Magic Within. On her blog Deeds & Words, she reviews many types of books and follows developments in food policy and other topics.
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