Kaimira: The Sky Village: Book One

The Sky Village is the soaring debut to Monk and Nigel Ashland’s new young adult series, Kaimira. The Ashlands take the reader to a futuristic world where humans, animals and intelligent machines called meks have been fighting for decades.

In China, twelve-year-old Mei Long’s mother has been kidnapped by meks. Her father sends her to live in the Sky Village, an intricate web of hot air balloons that flies high above the earth, while he remains on land to search for his wife. He entrusts Mei with the care of the Tree Book. Mei’s mother would read to her from the Tree Book each evening, telling her fantastic tales of children with names like Breaker and Lizard Girl. Her father warns her not to open the book, but Mei, desperate for a show more way to find her mother, disobeys him. She soon discovers that the Tree Book is no ordinary book. The children from the stories are real, and Mei’s book allows her to communicate with Breaker, a teenage boy whose real name is Rom. Rom knows Mei as Dragonfly from his own parents’ stories.

Rom lives in the ruins of Las Vegas, where the beasts roam freely and humans have been forced into hiding. Rom’s younger sister, Riley, has been kidnapped by beast-mek hybrids known as demons. Rom enters the seedy Las Vegas underground where he is forced to learn the art of demonsmithing to save his sister. Rom’s father was a master demonsmith, and Rom shares his father’s natural abilities. The demonsmiths conjure beast-mek hybrids for elaborate fights to entertain gamblers in the underground.

Mei and Rom discover that they share the mysterious kaimira gene – a gene that mixes beast and mek elements with their human DNA. The gene gives both of them power that they don’t fully understand and must struggle to control. Will this power enable them to save their loved ones? What might it cost them in the process?

I loved the imagery of the Sky Village. The colorful hot air balloons seemed so full of life that they made the contrast with the barren Las Vegas even more apparent. At first I was much more drawn to Mei’s story, but over the course of the book I really connected with Rom. His devotion to his sister and his determination to do anything to save her was very touching.

I did feel that the book lagged in some parts, while it seemed rushed in others. There is a lot going on in this book, and some elements aren’t explained as fully as they could be, which may be confusing to younger readers.

I think The Sky Village is a solid introduction to the series, and I am definitely going to pick up the next installment. I hope that we’ll get to meet some of the other characters mentioned in the Tree Book (particularly Lizard Girl) during the next four books in the series.

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Great story line, interesting characters, but ultimately hard to follow the larger story arc (where the sequels go from here) and distractingly peppered with video game imagery. I think that authors are trying too hard to stay relevant with young readers. The story is great on it's own. I keep wondering what will happen next, but the tech takes away from it for me.

After an apocalypse, humans are coming off a poor third in a battle between meks, mechanical monsters, and the animals, which have turned on both humans and the meks. Mei's mother has been kidnapped by meks and her father takes her to live with her mother's people in the Sky Village while he goes to the rescue. The Sky Village, a roving collection of interconnected hot air balloons, is strange to Mei, but she has the mysterious Tree Book, given to her by her father which allows her to communicate with Rom, who also has a copy, and who, with his sister Riley, is eking out a meagre living as a scavenger in the ruins of Las Vegas. When Riley is kidnapped too, Rom ventures into the subterranean community under Las Vegas to rescue her and show more learns to create and control a "demon" to fight for her release. Rom and Mei carry the kaimira gene, which means that they have human, beast and mek qualities in their DNA. Both must learn to use these qualities to survive and fight. The Sky Village is an exciting story with likeable main characters. The villain on the Las Vegas side was a bit one-dimensional, but a short epilogue fleshed things out a bit. The writing was engaging and the changing viewpoints kept things interesting (athough occasionally the switch provided a bit of a cliff-hanger). First in a 5-book series, and recommended. show less

The Trinary Wars, a series of devastating battles for global domination among humans, beasts, and meks (machines), have resulted in a world where chaos reigns. In China, a young girl named Mei is forced to leave her home on land and join the Sky Village after her mother is kidnapped by a brutal band of meks. Before she departs, her father gives her the Tree Book, a mysterious and possibly dangerous creation that allows her to communicate with Rom, a boy struggling to keep himself and his sister alive in the desolate ruins of Las Vegas, where beasts roam free. The first in the Kaimira series, The Sky Village follows both children as they attempt to make sense out of the book and some new found abilities.

A dazzling start to what promises show more to be a sensational new series, The Sky Village hosts a likable and sympathetic cast of characters, an exciting and fast-paced plot, and a wonderfully rich and believable setting. Occasional illustrations compliment the story nicely by allowing for better visualizations of this fantastical world and its inhabitants. While I enjoyed almost everything about this book, I especially liked the descriptions of Mei's life on the balloons. The Ashlands have created a unique landscape that spoke to the child in me. I could see the sky walkers dancing across ropes from balloon to balloon as Mei watched breathlessly. It was a stark contrast to the dark underbelly of Las Vegas that served as home to Rom and his sister, Riley.

Geared toward middle readers, I think even adult fans of science fiction and fantasy books will be pleased with The Sky Village. I'll definitely be looking for the second installment, when hopefully we'll be introduced Lizard Girl, another Tree Book owner we've yet to meet. show less

I enjoyed reading this book and I think it's an okay book for the YA crowd. I can't fully evaluate the book because it is only the first one in the series.

The ideas of both the Sky Village and the demonsmiths are fascinating ideas. The Sky Village is a very fantastical sort of place that is very focused on its traditions and rituals. This interested me, especially since traditional cultures interest me normally. However, like many other traditional societies, they are wary of strangers, particularly one of the protagonists, Mei. Even though she was born in the village, she is still a stranger to them. This is simply because her mother left the village with her and she was raised on the ground as a land-dweller.

The other main show more protagonist, Rom, turns out to be a natural demonsmith like his father and is able to summon his demon Spot (named by his sister) without all the required equipment that other demonsmiths need. This makes him much more versatile and valuable than others, which is noted by Diamond Teeth, the man who basically runs everything in the underground gambling scene.

This book certainly isn't on my list of favorite YA books, but it's a decent read and I would recommend it in case a person would find it to their liking. After all, I have my own YA series that I love and that I love and that I still love even as a 22 year old. Perhaps this series will mean the same thing to others. I can see the potential for that. As for me, I will likely keep my eye out for the rest of this series as it comes out because I like to finish reading the series that I've started on. show less

I loved the idea of an entire village living in the sky! I could imagine how terrifying yet thrilling it would be to walk the ropes between balloons. I also liked the idea of being able to create a creature solely from imagination; interesting idea. I will probably buy book two just to see where it goes.

I'm going to say right off the bat that I didn't really enjoy this book - it was an easy read, but it seemed like nothing happened, even after hundreds of pages.

And so, a list (of the things I disliked):

1. Mei and Rom (but especially Mei) were entirely too "OH NOES! THE WORLD IS OUT TO GET ME AND ONLY ME!" I think I would have enjoyed the book more if it had been told from someone else's perspective (at least partially).

2. It seems like Mei and Rom became friends too suddenly - I have no recollection of them sitting down every night or day and writing to one another - it says they do, but I have no real proof of this beyond one instance.

3. There is too much assumption on the part of the authors that we know the back story. Yes, Mei and show more Rom have little knowledge of the back story, but even they know more than we, as the reader, do. Undoubtedly they have some idea of how much time has passed since the Trinary Wars, but the reader is left to grasp at whatever clues are given (it's obviously not been too long, since there's still canned food that's safe to eat (based on the fact that Rom eats it without complaint (after he realizes it's peaches, that is), but he did worry about his foot becoming infected after it was bitten). Batteries ("power cells") still work, so unless the future has developed extremely-long-lasting batteries, it hasn't been that long. Yet it seems as though the main characters do not remember the wars at all (presumably they hadn't been born yet).

4. The novel asks us to suspend disbelief, yet it's science fiction (apocalypse/post-apocalypse fits in science fiction), which should at least be plausible (and thus one shouldn't have to suspend anything).

5. Too many names beginning with 'r' (Rom, Riley, Rodriguez). Which, admittedly, doesn't count as a valid complaint, but it annoyed me (almost as though though there wasn't much thought given to thinking up names). (I did enjoy the play on CD-ROM, though. That was clever.)

6. Unless you've read a summary beforehand, it's very difficult to distinguish where Mei lives early on (unless you go based on names, which, of course, you can't anymore because a person might have a name that's completely off where they come from).

I think it's possible I'm just outgrowing this genre (fantasy/sci-fi) entirely. I can totally see my five-years-ago!self enjoying this.

Sadly, this book is part of a series. I haven't been hooked, and, thus, probably won't go on to read the rest of the series (which isn't out yet). Howver, if a prequel covering the time before the Trinary Wars and during the Trinary Wars, I might just read it. show less