Guess who has got a case of The Sky Blues?

 

So me reading this book has come after I read If I See You Again Tomorrow, also by Robbie Couch, and really loving it. As in probably one of my top books of the year enjoy. And since I loved that book so much, it just made sense in my brain to read another of Couch’s books, and today it’s The Sky Blues.

The blurbs tells us that Sky Baker may be openly gay, but in his small, insular town, making sure he’s invisible has always been easier than being himself. Determined not to let anything ruin his senior year, Sky decides to make a splash at his high school’s annual beach bum party by asking his crush, Ali, to prom – and he has thirty days to do it. What better way to start living loud and proud than pulling off the gayest promposal that Rock Ledge, Michigan, has ever seen? Then, Sky’s plans get leaked by an anonymous hacker in a deeply homophobic e-blast that quickly goes viral. He’s fully prepared to skip town altogether until his classmates give him a reason to fight back by turning his thirty-day promposal countdown into a schoolwide hunt to expose the e-blast perpetrator. But what happens at the end of the thirty days? Will Sky get to keep his hard-won visibility? Or will his small-town blues stop him from being his true self?

The opening chapter has Sky shower-dreaming about Ali Rashid, that he has a massive crush on, obviously. He ends up falling in the shower then going to school with his friend, Bree, that he lives with in this massive mansion-vibe house. The end of the chapter is Sky telling the readers he’s going to prompose to Ali in thirty days because he wants to make a point, but he also has the massive crush, so? In the second chapter, we get the briefest interaction between Ali and Sky. Ali has a nickname for Sky, which is cute, but the interaction is next to nothing, and then you see a little of the living situation Sky’s got going on. Again, he’s living with Bree, but he has a space in the basement that no one really goes into after his mum didn’t want him around.

You see this bit early on when Ali is throwing a party at his house and that Sky’s friends, Marshall and Bree, have both been invited, but Sky hasn’t. I did then appreciate seeing how a teenage crush goes because to Sky, him not being invited is the worst possible thing that could happen to him, and when he does get invited, suddenly everything is okay. And you know what’s sad? That is exactly how a crush works, and it’s so annoyingly accurate. That waiting on the very simple interaction and action from the person you have the crush on to basically make your day, or to make things better is exactly how it goes.

So Marshall has this friend, Teddy, that was slowly being integrated into the friend trio, or at least kept showing up, and you could tell that Sky was very on edge around him – he never actually even told Marshall about his Ali crush – but Teddy tries talking to Sky at Ali’s party, and I can’t lie, even though that was only about 50 pages in, my ass fully wondered whether that meant Teddy might have been into Sky and wondered whether there was going to be some dimension where he ended up with Teddy instead of Ali.

The e-blast comes, I will say, I actually forgot about it when I was reading the book. Something I think I’ve come to the realisation is that, while this is only the second Robbie Couch book I’ve read, I think I really like his writing style. It feels very, and this is mean to be a positive, casual. And it’s a vibe that I personally like and write with myself. But the e-blast, it hits, only about a third of the way through the book, and I really appreciated how badly it just hit – it’s like Sky was on some wave already, then an asteroid knocked him off his surfboard and into the ocean. But after the hit, the who they think did it plays very little a role in what comes next.

Now speaking on the characters, Bree, one of the side characters, had this habit that always frustrated me when it popped up. I mention it, not as a criticism on her, but because it’s a habit you could see a real person. There were multiple occasions where something would happen, and instead of talking about it, we’d end up finding out something was up because Sky always noticed that she was off. It was the case of she’d always be in a bad mood and then you sort of just had to wait until whatever it was about popped up, or she decided to talk about it.

The characters go on this hunt of who they think sent the e-blast out to everyone, and I can’t lie, it was all very Miss Marple. The characters immediately had an idea of who it was, and then go on this full-on investigation to make sure they can prove who it is. I will say, a lot of the stuff that happened did feel a little convenient from time to time, however, this is a YA book. And not a mystery YA book, so it’s not like I expected it to be some tight investigation. I’ll give the book that at the very least, the investigation was tight, and it was a clean-cut thing that all seemed to work out and make sense – none of the links to things felt that tenuous.

I think with the ending too, there was one of two ways it could have gone, since there is this looming countdown the whole time, there was the option to either have this massive blow out event as the culmination of everything that had happened throughout the book, or the other option was the more chill route. Since this book came out in 2021, I think it’s fine for me to actually talk about the ending and the route it went. I’m glad it took the chiller route, rather than the big blowout. I think with everything that happened throughout the book – this is definitely one of the books that more smaller blips of conflict and drama throughout – so I think the chiller ending suited the vibe of the whole book better.

Although, saying that, I do think it could have been stronger. Like I mentioned in a previous paragraph about how some of the characters immediately pinpoint one character as the villain, my issue came with the fact that they played little to no actual part in what was happening. It was like, the characters mentioned that this thing happened, and we get told what happens at the end, and there is this message that the ending doesn’t always work out the perfect way you want it to with satisfaction and revenge. Sadly, that is kind of what ends up happening, and while the ending is nice, it’s just that. It’s kind of like, “Okay :) there you go”. It just, to me, felt like I was missing something from the end.

But even then, I did really enjoy the book overall. That’s the one thing I have in terms of negativity. The ending was fine, but it could have been stronger. I wrote this post in the wake of me watching an episode of Drag Race Philippines, and something one of the judges said to competitor, Hana Beshie, who, for context, was consistently in the top but never won a challenge. They told her something to the effect of that, “It’s not that you’re not good enough, it’s just that someone else always does extra credit.” And that’s how I felt about this book. I definitely enjoyed it, and I can say I’m a fan of Robbie Couch’s writing now, it’s just that I like If I See You Again Tomorrow, also by Couch, more.

Okay, bye!