Kirit Densira, a seventeen year old girl, and the people of her city live in bone towers teetering above the churning poisonous clouds. The only way to travel between towers are the rare bridges or, once you are trained and take your flight test, soaring on wings. Kirit is soon faced by a skymouth, a giant, invisible creature, so named because all you see is a mouth opening up in the sky - a slimy, sharp-toothed, gaping hole - before you are gone. No one but the mysterious Singers, the strict government officials, ever survived facing a skymouth; until Kirit Densira screamed so loudly and so horribly, it disappeared. Kirit must face something more dangerous than even the skymouths soon, the tradition of the Singers. When a Singer confronts Kirit, she must make a choice to decide the future for not only herself, but for her city: follow or rebel?
Kirit challenges the reader’s mind as she develops her critical thinking and her own opinions. In the beginning, she aspired only to become a trader, like her mother. When a singer was spotted through the window “a moment of childhood fear struck [her]” as Kirit remembered the children who gone with them, only to come back years later “as gray-robed strangers, scarred and tattooed and sworn to protect the city” (17). In this way, Kirit is still a child, though seventeen years old. She still lacks the critical thinking of trying to understand that Singers are needed as a government. All she sees is the monster hiding in her closet, waiting to pop out and steal her away. When she becomes one of those children taken away, she at first can only see the gray robes and dark wings they wear, forced to trade them for her own colorful wings. Once Kirit begins learning though, she sees the importance of Singers: “To protect tower from tower” (245), to stop war from ravaging the city. Though this is true in some ways, Kirit still isn’t fulling evaluating the Singers. Just understanding the constructive and following is only half, she must see the destructive as well and make change. Singers keep to tradition; laws don’t change easily. When a child falls down a hole that leads straight to the poisonous clouds, Kirit tries to help the girl as she dangles precariously from a ledge. Kirit begins to tell another Singer how to help pull the girl up in a moment that tradition says must be silent, but this “attracted more attention than the fallen child” (218). Tradition would let an innocent child fall to her death with barely a glance towards her. Kirit finally sees tradition as the harmful constraint it is and challenges it for all to see. Kirit developed a critical eye that many fall victim to and many more still will. Kirit’s journey through the novel challenges the reader to see the world with a grain of salt. Is the status quo the morally right path to follow?
As Updraft’s society shows us, tradition is not always the best path to follow. The Singers show us how tradition can be turned into an excuse for tyranny, and Kirit teaches us we must never forget to look deeper than we are shown. We cannot be deceived by surfaces, for every horizon looks beautiful; it is the monsters lurking just past it that are dangerous. If we as a society can improve in exploring these far sights, wars can be stopped before they start, prejudices and inequalities can be eradicated, and lives can be saved before they are lost. This novel opens readers’ eyes to the world around us while giving us an amazing science fiction novel that should be read by all.