The world of Sky City never quite settles beneath your feet. The action of Jacqueline Crooks’s second novel unfolds in a recognisable 1990s London, yet everything seems subtly untethered from reality: a council estate suspended above the city, voices drifting in and out through pirate radio, ghosts walking beside the living. The narrative floats just above the surface of the everyday, a world where trauma transforms the mundane into something uncanny.
We first meet protagonist Jaycee as a child, trapped in a west London housing estate she calls the Cyborg House. Her stepfather subjects her to horrific sexual abuse while her mother turns a blind eye, exercising her own brand of cruelty. Families, Jaycee comes to believe, are “dangerous places … like nests of poisonous spiders, huddled in dark, undisturbed corners, their venom, a single drop enough to rot the body inside out”. Eventually taken into care, she finds an unlikely lifeline in Ella-G, another damaged girl whose exuberance masks wounds as profound as Jaycee’s own; both feel “on the outside of the world”. The care home turns out to be similarly brutal, and the pair survive together, forging a friendship that becomes the novel’s emotional anchor.
