Sky Shielder (Part 1 - Overview)
Hello, all. Welcome to my review of the book that I’ve described on the Bastion Discord as “knockoff indie Fourth Wing”.
I don’t feel like that’s a malicious or inaccurate description. Much like Fourth Wing - or, at the very least, the wider story of The Empyrean - Sky Shielder is a Romantasy that features:
Dragon riders
A kingdom shielded from the supernatural evils of the wider world by magical wards
Said magical wards are a driver of the plot
A female MC who is not particularly physically capable and has a talent for working with poisons
A male LI who is a morally gray, brooding bad boy with a softer side of the MC to coax out
There are many differences, of course. It’s just that given that Lindsay Buroker’s full-time indie status and high output favor her choosing projects based on what’s selling well at the time, and since The Empyrean has had a few years in the sun, I find the similarities hard to ignore. It’s sort of like how it’s hard to ignore that The Force Awakens is a rehash of A New Hope. Yes, there are other films with a similar number of points of similarity, but when one considers that Disney was trying to secure audience engagement in their new investment and had a decade of backlash to the Prequel Trilogy to consider, it’s very obvious that they were trying to make The Force Awakens as safe and nostalgic as possible.
However, there is one difference that I cannot, in good faith, ignore: unlike The Empyrean, Sky Shielder is not sludge. It’s honestly decent. I almost want to say that it’s good, though it has a few issues in its execution that keep it from reaching that level.
This review will be split into three parts. The first, which we’ll tackle today, will be a high-level overview that will give my rating and cover the various odds-and-ends relevant to people picking the book up for the first time. The second, which will release on November 25th, will analyze the book’s qualities in more detail. The last part, on December 2nd, will put this book’s similarities to The Empyrean under a microscope to see how the knockoff surpasses the original.
Let's dive in.
STATS
Title: Sky Shielder
Series: Fire and Fang (Book 1)
Author(s): Lindsay Buroker
Genre: Fantasy Romantasy
First Printing: October 2025
Publisher: Self-published to Amazon
SPOILER WARNING
Mild spoilers for Sky Shielder will be included throughout this review, through I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labelled sections.
PREMISE
From the Amazon product page, we get:
He helped destroy her family. Now he wants to protect her. Dare she trust him?
For generations, magical sky shields have defended the Garden Kingdom from dragons and their savage riders. Now, the shield protecting the capital has been sabotaged, the castle destroyed, and all except the youngest member of the royal family slain.
A healer with a love for books, antiques, and avoiding family gatherings, Princess Syla never thought the future of the kingdom would rely upon her—or that assassins would be hunting her down. With only an aged bodyguard with bad knees to protect her, she’s in way over her head.
Then he shows up.
The powerful and deadly dragon rider Captain Vorik claims to be from a faction that wants peace, not war, and who opposed the attack. Supposedly, he and his dragon ally were sent to protect Syla.
With threats coming from all directions, she has no choice but to accept his help, but she doesn’t trust him—or her attraction to him.
Why is he really there? To kill her? To spy on her? To seduce her?
All Syla knows for certain is that she must get the best of Vorik before he can get the best of her. Her kingdom and her life depend on it.
Warning: Sky Shielder contains sex, violence, and arrogant and opinionated dragons.
Reaction
This premise is almost on point. It’s a accurate promise of what to expect from Syla’s POV.
The one issue I do see with this premise is that it neglects to mention that Vorik is the other POV. This means that, while Syla is indeed asking herself why Vorik is helping, we the audience know perfectly well that Vorik is not with the faction that wants peace. The Garden Kingdom is split across multiple islands, and only the shield over the capital was destroyed; Vorik’s mission is to seduce Syla so that she’ll reveal the location of the “sky shielder” devices that sustain the shields on the other islands. If you are hoping for genuine mystery about whether Vorik is to be trusted (in the same vein as, say, the mystery of whom Holland could trust in Alchemy of Secrets), I’m afraid you will be disappointed.
I’ll be coming back to that last line in the Content Warning.
RATING: 5.5/10
I really went back and forth on what to rate this book, sometimes going as high as a 6, other times as low as a 4.
Structurally, the narrative is sound. I didn’t notice any plot holes, the characters and their motivations all made sense, and the worldbuilding held together. The story doesn’t collapse by leaning on a theme that ends up imploding on itself.
In the end, though, I reserve a 6/10 for a book that I would at least recommend, and I don’t feel I can really do that here, for two key issues:
The Romance elements of this book are just pornography. There is no emotion in the relationship between Syla and Vorik, just sex. And since the audience knows out the gate that Vorik really is untrustworthy, there’s nothing to distract from that fact. As a result, instead of seeing these two characters grow together and build a meaningful bond (which is something we’ve gotten in Magnetic Magic), we start with them being sexually aware of each other and progress to things getting ever-more sexual. There’s nothing deeper to this narrative.
Information keeps getting repeated ad nauseum. I don’t feel the issue is quite as bad as Alchemy of Secrets, but it is enough to continually remind me that I’m reading a book written in an era with ever-shrinking reader attention spans.
A 5.5 from me is a perfect balance of meh. I’m not saying that reading this book would be a waste of your time, but I can’t really say that it’s worth one’s time, either (unless the sequel turns out to be good).
CONTENT WARNING
Warning: Sky Shielder contains sex, violence, and arrogant and opinionated dragons.
If you are familiar with Buroker’s work, then you will not be shocked by the level of violence in this book. It's not particularly gory. Between fake-out deaths and shenanigans incoming dragon magic, the violence also ends up being blunted by the end of the book. It’s not enough to undermine the stakes or tension, but it does make this warning feel unnecessary.
There is a scene of torture in this book. This is magical torture that only describes pain, rather than any specific acts that would be analogous to the real world.
Rape is referenced in this book, with Syla fending off an attempted assault with her magic.
Which brings us to the sex … and, yes, this is a euphemism for pornography. There are two graphic sex scenes in this book, one in Chapter 24 and one in Chapter 33. There’s also a great deal of talking about sex, though much like the discussions of sex in The Empyrean, this wouldn’t be noteworthy if there wasn’t pornography on the page. It’s merely awkward in isolation.
Also, since I don’t have another place to mention this, I’ll note that Buroker seems to still have some of whatever inspired the handling of the nudity in Magnetic Magic in her system. Near the end of this book, there is a scene where Syla removes her robe and uses it to cover something, with the implication being that her casually standing naked in the open beside her clothed companions is less suspicious than leaving the thing she choses to cover out in the open. This is a rather bizarre moment. The only two instances of nudity in the book before then were during the sex scenes, implying that this is not a universe were casual nudity is just something that happens. Furthermore, her companions are startled by this action and don’t volunteer their own clothes to help her, yet they don’t comment on her bizarre behavior after the fact. The whole moment ends up feeling like something Buroker threw in because she wanted it there, not because it actually made sense. (If the sequel provides more context on this world’s view of nudity and retroactively justifies it, that’s fine. It’s just a very strange moment on the first read.)
GENRE
This book absolutely earns the designation of Romantasy.
The thing is, while the Romance in this story is just pornography, it is narratively relevant to the core plot. As we covered back in the Interlude on Romantasy at the start of this year, that’s the threshold to be a proper Romance. Vorik is only part of Syla’s journey because he is trying to seduce her. What’s more, while the second sex scene was set up as an inevitable event well in advance, the exact manner in which is comes to pass is relevant to the flow of the climax. Syla accepts that Vorik is a threat, so she lures him into a cave where she’s set up some candles whose smoke is laced with a sedative, and she uses sex as a means to distract him for long enough for the sedative to get into his system (whereas she is immune to that same smoke). This knocks him out long enough for her to locate and extract a functional shielder and to have a meaningful head start on moving it back to the capital before Vorik wakes up.
So, yes. This book where the Romance is just porn is more deserving of the title of Romance, and thus Romantasy, than the bundle of delusion and sexual tension spat out by a well-established Romance author.
WRAP-UP
This concludes my big-picture overview for Sky Shielder itself. Next Tuesday, November 25th, we’ll analyze the plot, characters, worldbuilding, prose, and the romance in the book. Then, on December 2nd, we’ll conclude with an analysis of this book as a knockoff Fourth Wing.
Thank you all for joining today. Don’t forget to subscribe and share if you liked what you saw here. Take care, everyone, and have a good week.
