Sky Shielder (Part 2 - Qualitative Analysis)
Hello, all. Welcome to Part 2 of my analysis of Shield Shielder - or, as I’ve jokingly referred to it, knockoff indie Fourth Wing.
This part will break down the various qualities of this book: Plot, Character, Worldbuilding, Prose, and Romance. Please see Part 1 if you’d like the overview and my explanation of the rating. Part 3, due out next Tuesday, will explore the comparisons between this book and Fourth Wing (or, rather, The Empyrean as a whole).
Let’s get into it.
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
Rating: 5.5/10
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.
PLOT
As a Romantasy, I see two ways of looking at this plot: as a Fantasy, and as a Romance.
Fantasy
The Fantasy plot of Sky Shielder is fine, even without the sense of mystery promised in the Premise. Syla survives the attack on the capital and, upon learning that the sky shielder that protects the capital has been destroyed (rather than just being shut off), goes on a quest to bring an intact shielder back to the capital from another island. Vorik, meanwhile, wants her to reveal the location of at least one other shielder so that the dragon riders can swoop in and conquer another island. It’s straightforward, its functional, and it carries the book.
Romance
Because the Romance is just porn, there’s no narrative substance to this. There’s no emotional payoff. We aren’t seeing Syla or Vorik develop. We start with full awareness that they will have sex, and eventually, they have sex.
That’s a shame, because, even with the knowledge that Vorik really can’t be trusted, there was the potential for dramatic irony. We could have watched the pair grow closer and develop feelings for each other with the looming awareness of Vorik’s true mission and the leaden weight of understanding what the reveal of the truth might do to Syla.
CHARACTERS
Syla
Syla is one of our two POVs, and she is effectively the protagonist. She’s the youngest heir to the royal throne, kept separate from royal duties because she wasn’t needed for the line of succession to continue, and now finds herself thrust into a position of royal responsibility. Her magical ability to heal others, coupled with her knowledge of non-magical healing (and using poisons) also gives her a vital skill when magic isn’t necessary. She handles her rapidly changing circumstances with admirable grace.
While I am going to point out some recycled character traits from Magnetic Magic as we continue this analysis, I will say that Syla does not feel recycled. Her narrative voice is fresh and new (at least compared to that series - I haven’t caught up on Buroker’s other recent series). She also feels true to the world in which she exists, so there’s no disconnect from her acting like an American university student in a world that shouldn’t support such a mindset.
Vorik
Vorik is our other POV, as well as the Love Interest. He’s pretty straightforward, another iteration on the Barbarian Love Interest you see on so many bodice-ripper covers: strong enough to overpower Syla if he wanted to, gray in morality and rough around the edges, but with a soft core that will enable Syla to connect with him emotionally as well as physically. Buroker gave him the quirk of being obsessed with fruits and other sweet things that grow within the garden kingdom, not unlike Luna’s love of chocolate in Magnetic Magic.
I find Vorik rather bland, but he’s fine for the story being told. My one gripe about him is that I don’t feel like any of his conflict about potentially betraying Syla feels genuine. There’s never a moment where I thought he might actually betray his people and genuinely side with the Garden Kingdom. At most, he felt slightly bad for how Syla would feel after the fact. Buroker gives him this code of honor that influences how he fights and makes him feel guilty about lying, but I was never particularly sold on that, either.
Dragons
The dragons in this book are actual characters. They’ve not particularly deep characters, but already, this is a step up from The Empyrean.
Agrevlari
Vorik’s dragon comes across as a dragon version of Duncan from Magnetic Magic, quick to engage in quippy banter and eager to woo the wild dragon that he is attracted to. He often lures Vorik into banter over trivial details. Unlike Vorik, who sometimes things about how bad he’ll feel when Syla feels bad about his betrayal, Agrevlari is fully devoted to the mission and eggs Vorik on to finish the job, albeit never to such an extent that the pressure feels hostile.
Wreylith
A wild dragon with personal history with Syla’s family, Wreyleth e is a gruff and anti-social creature who nonetheless helps Syla because it serves her own goals (more on that in a moment). The three times she involves herself in events all play out pretty much the same: she threatens Syla, is mollified with some compensation, and then begrudgingly helps (or doesn’t harm) Syla on her own terms. It seems pretty clear that Syla will become some sort of dragon rider by the end of this series, with Wreylith as her dragon.
Tertiary Characters
There are only a few tertiary characters of note:
Sergeant Fel, Syla’s bodyguard
Aunt Tibby, Syla’s aunt, who is skilled in magical engineering
Captain Lesva, Vorik’s former lover and his rival for completing the shielder destruction mission
I don’t have much to say about any of these characters. Each mainly exists to prod Syla and Vorik to pursue their respective missions, with Fel and Tibby doing this by reminding Syla of her purpose and warning her away from being attracted to Vorik while Lesva does it by attacking Syla on Vorik’s watch.
There are a handful of secondary characters that are all functional. Not much more that’s worth saying about them outside of a deeper analysis.
WORLDBUILDING
The worldbuilding of this story is very functional, though it is not without weak points.
Geopolitics
The Garden Kingdom is composed of a series of islands, each protected by its own sky shielder that prevents magical creatures from entering the island. These sky shielders are described as machines built by the gods, who long ago depated, and are linked to the “moon-mark” that the Garden Kingdom’s royal line carry. Outside of the sky shielders and the healing that those with moon-marks can provide, magic doesn’t play a major role in people’s daily lives, though Aunt Tibby has some tractors that are apparently magical (the workings of which never get addressed). The most advanced non-magical tech we are shown are gunpowder cannons (not even handheld guns) and pocketwatches (which I’m assuming are clockwork). Dragon riders may have access to magic from their dragons that enhance their senses and allow them to perform superhuman athletic feats, though this doesn’t extend to every rider (and it’s not clear, at least on a first read, why some riders get this while others don’t).
As for the riders, they are the paramilitary force scraped together from the world’s barbarian tribes, whose ancestors were all outcasts of the Garden Kingdom. Their goal is to take over the Garden Kingdom so as to benefit from the rich lands that exist under the protection of the shielders. While this is straightforward enough, I did notice a few details that made little sense, such as the fact that these outcasts apparently use the same currency as the Garden Kingdom, that dragon riders are paid salaries, and that there a strict military hierarchy that affects dragons and riders equally (so a dragon and rider are the same rank, but they answer to only higher-ranked members of their own species).
Religion
The gods are a frustrating weak point in this worldbuilding. Buroker made them important, explicitly telling us that dragons and other magical creatures were made by “the storm god” and that there are gods to the sun, earth, etc., but these entities never even get names. It feels like Buroker had an idea for a pantheon but never bothered to write any lore to back it up.
Outside of the gods themselves, we don’t get any insight into the religious worldview of this setting. There are temples where healing takes place, but no real sense of worship or devotion even within the temple walls. To an extent, this makes sense - with how the gods are described, they might have just been Sufficient Advanced aliens, and thus never actually provided guidelines for their worship before departing the world - but when combined with the flatness of the gods, it really does feel like a neglected aspect of the worldbuilding that has then had a spotlight shone on its deficiencies.
Magical Bonds
A quirk in this setting that is interesting but not really utilized is the side effects of moon-mark healing. Apparently, this creates a bond between the healer and the healed, compelling the healed to serve the healer for a brief period. However, this isn’t explored, and the only confirmed case of this is Fel, who himself admits he’d have helped Syla regardless of the compulsion. It’s implied that Syla forges this bond with Wreylith early in the book, when she removes a poisoned fang from the dragon’s foot and uses magical healing to expunge the poison.
PROSE
Beaten over the Head
The repetition of information in this story got very old, very quickly. At first, I assumed this was just an editing error - that is to say, the Buroker had forgotten she’d already established something, re-established it, and then failed to cull the redundant details in the editing process - but when character motivations are getting rehashed well into Act Two, it became apparent that this was at least partially intentional. It made it very hard to stay immersed.
A question I found myself going back and forth on was: is this repetition as bad and as destructive to the story being told as the repetition in Alchemy of Secrets?
In terms of how often we get reminded about things, I do think what we see here is just as bad as in Alchemy of Secrets. Barely a chapter goes by without us getting reminded of basic information, and those reminders are not justified by characterization. At best, it reads like Buroker refused to provide any sort of filter to what details were and weren’t relevant to share with the audience (i.e. even if the characters were thinking about or talking about these things, it wouldn’t have hurt the narrative to leave those reminders out).
On the whole, though, I feel like the problem is less severe.
Alchemy of Secrets was a thriller. It leaned very heavily on the tension it was generating. The vibes and emotions were important to keep the audience engaged. Pummeling the audience in the face with repeated information disrupted immersion, and thus, disrupted the emotional connection to a story that demanded that connection.
Sky Shielder, by contrast, has a narrative backbone that exists regardless of the vibes. If anything, the damage to the vibes was already done by having Vorik as a POV character. Reminding the audience of things we already know can therefore only harm the intellectual engagement, reminding us that we are, in fact, reading fiction rather than experiencing these events with the characters. It’s annoying, sure, but the story keeps chugging along regardless.
Quippy
The quippy dialogue seen in Magnetic Magic is here as well. It feels every bit as forced as Luna’s interactions with Bolin and Jasmine in Quest of the Wolf (more on that next month, when the review of that book is scheduled). It also tends towards being very awkward, particularly when characters discuss sex in situations where it really doesn’t seem appropriate, at least given the values that are otherwise on display.
I’m guessing this is a stylistic choice of Buroker’s writing in general, one I either forgot about in the decade since I read Fallen Empire or that Buroker developed over that time period. This isn’t something that kills the narrative. This isn’t a story that is trying to be harrowing before killing the tone with a joke. It’s just irritating if you aren’t into that sort of quippiness.
Credit where it is due, Buroker does at least confine the quipping to interactions between specific characters, and those characters banter about specific things. Vorik and Agrevlari banter about certain things, Syla and Fel banter about other things, and Vorik and Syla have yet another set of ideas their quips focus on. It does at least feel true to the relationships, even if it doesn’t feel true to the scenarios when the banter is exchanged.
Women Writing Men
This is a small point that doesn’t affect the overall quality of the story, but I’m going to give Yarros flak for this when we review the bonus content version of Chapter 9 of Fourth Wing, so I’ve got to be consistent about it for Buroker as well.
I’ve said in past reviews that sexual content is a point where men writing women and women writing men tends to cause problems. Men and women simply process these things differently. It’s not impossible to write around this, but if an author is not careful, a POV character can end up feeling … off.
Unfortunately, this is the case with Vorik’s POV.
In the scenes without any sexual elements, he reads convincingly as a male character. Even in a lot of the scenes where sex is discussed in dialogue, he’s not the problem. The issue lies in any narrative descriptions in his POV that describe Syla in a sexual manner or describe Vorik’s arousal - i.e. the text that shows us what Vorik is thinking. At their best, these read in a very generic and inoffensive way, as if Buroker has simply read a lot of male POVs that were written by men. At their worst, though, Vorik becomes a mouthpiece for female wish fulfillment.
I’m not saying that men don’t say these things to women. We absolutely do, and if these were dialogue spoken by Vorik to Syla, I wouldn’t think twice about them. It’s just these descriptions deviate enough from how we actually think that, in the longer descriptions, it becomes painfully obvious that Vorik was not written by a man.
ROMANCE
As stated above, there’s no emotional growth in this relationship. Syla and Virok are sexually aware of each other from the start, there’s a moment of rising tension when they first ride a dragon together, and then the next two times they have some privacy, they engage in sex acts. This would be weak sauce even without the graphic detail of those sex scenes. With that detail, this Romance is just porn.
What makes this so frustrating is that Buroker has shown, though Magnetic Magic, that she can indeed build meaningful chemistry between her romantic leads. Something we’ll get into as we wrap up the reviews of Magnetic Magic is that the emphasis of sex eclipses everything else in Luna and Duncan’s relationship, until Triumph of the Wolf is itself basically pornography. However, even in Triumph of the Wolf, there was still believable chemistry between the characters. It is believable that Luna and Duncan would be attracted to each other. Here, Syla and Vorik just want to have sex. The closest we get to an emotional connection is Syla indulging Vorik’s sweet tooth by making him a cobbler after he foisting the berries for said cobbler onto her.
A WORKING STORY
On the whole, Sky Shielder is a functional novel. While the Romance is very weak, the Fantasy story picks up the slack. I’m not quite at a place where I’d actively recommend it, but neither do I feel that reading it would be a waste of time if someone is truly interested in it.
Next Tuesday, December 2nd, we will wrap up this analysis with the comparative analysis to The Empyrean. I hope you’ll jon me for it.
Thank you all for stopping by. Please remember to subscribe and share if you liked what you read here. Take care, everyone, and have a good week.
