Updraft by Fran Wilde

Okay, if you don't need to know a lot about how societies got the way they are, or more specifically, if you need to go further back to get to the whole underlying structure of the society, and need to know if this is an evolution of some form of our world or an entirely fantasy setting, then this might not be the book for you. If you're okay with fiction that will never really tell you why people came to live the way they do that is drastically different from everything we know, then...this book is pretty good. It's solid mostly-YA, about a young person finding that they are assigned to a place in society they hate, and in bucking that, starting to tear down the entire structure and exposing long-hidden inequities that adults just don't perceive or do anything about.

I wouldn't say that Updraft transcends those YA dystopian tropes, but the world Wilde has created is very interesting, if ultimately unexplained. It's partly because it's so interesting that that lack of information is so frustrating. I'd like to understand, and maybe in later books, if there are to be any, we'll get to see below the cloud line. (Also, permanent clouds? Hmm.)

Because when we're with these characters, we live far above the cloud line. Not a person living, not for many many generations, has seen the land below. They live in bone spires, but despite the part where it seems like they live in a skeleton, the bones continue to grow. The people were fleeing something below the clouds when they came up here to live, but we don't know what. We also don't know why these bare bones act like bare bones don't generally, at least in our world. By the end of the book, we will be no more enlightened. There are also invisible monsters that act like toothed rips in the sky, than can kill quickly and ferociously.

People fly from Spire to Spire, or at least traders do, and others if they pass the necessary tests. The Spires used to be politically fractured and are knit back together by the traders and by the work of the Singers, who administer the law, which is very binding in some areas, including keeping shutters closed. Disobedience can be punished immediately and punitively, attached laws as weights to the arms of the people that would keep them from flying. Or might cause them to plummet to their unseen deaths.

The main character is Kirit, the daughter of a trader. She is only days from taking her flying tests. Her mother is away visiting other towers, making trades that are seen to knit the society together, when Kirit breaks a law, and she and one of her dearest friends are held responsible. While carrying out their punishment of cleaning the lower levels of her Spire, they are given some old bone chips that might have belonged to her friend's father, who was sentenced to death many years previously. They look like they might describe the bone that holds the Singers.

We go through the testing, the consequences Kirit doesn't expect, then follow her as she joins the Singers later than most do, and as she learns about their world and whether or not she agrees with it. (I'd spoiler alert here, but I feel like you can draw your own conclusions.) She discovers many of the hidden depths of the Singers' home bone, but still not really anything about the basic makeup of her world, just more how the current social order came to be.

So, overall, this is perfectly adequate, but it doesn't feel like it's doing much to stretch beyond the conventions of the YA dystopia. The world is certainly interesting and intriguing as hell. That's about as much as we get about it, although Goodreads does label this as Book 1. Presumably there will be more books in the future to explain the sky, the constant clouds, and how these giants bones keep growing unconnected to any sort of skin or body that we can see.