Paperback, 448 pages
en-Latn-GB language
Published Jan. 1, 2023 by Orbit.
All her life, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the destruction of planet Earth. Raised on Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet.
Then Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons, and she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands. Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, Kyr must escape from everything she’s ever known. If she succeeds, she will find a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could ever have imagined.
Some Desperate Glory is a thrillingly told space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find and the path you must forge when every choice is stripped from you. This stand‐alone …
All her life, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the destruction of planet Earth. Raised on Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet.
Then Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons, and she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands. Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, Kyr must escape from everything she’s ever known. If she succeeds, she will find a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could ever have imagined.
Some Desperate Glory is a thrillingly told space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find and the path you must forge when every choice is stripped from you. This stand‐alone novel is the highly anticipated debut from Astounding Award‐ and World Fantasy Award‐winner Emily Tesh.
The first half of this book reads like a very predictable standard space opera, then it takes a turn for the wild. There are a lot of great ideas here, and my only criticism is that the pacing in the second half was awkward. Tesh rushed through some segments that could have used more detail, yet lingered on other parts way too long.
I read these 448 pages in 3 days during nanowrimo. 'nuff said.
This has a whole bunch of elements that i loved, but mostly a great plot and clear character arc. At the start of the book, Kyr is an about-to-graduate cadet on a asteroid bound space station that houses the last few thousands of humanity after an alien civilization has destroyed Earth.
Things are not as they seem, which Kyr finds out by getting assigned to Nursery to bear children for humanity, despite her top scores, and her brother refusing assignment and deserting.
A word of warning that there's some intense cult-like abuse in the pages.
I read this on the recommendation of @[email protected] in her Washington Post column on SF. You should read her columns too.
www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/05/08/nick-harkaway-bina-shah-moniquill-blackgoose/
This book really stuck with me after reading it. I had to stop reading it before bed because I would stay up too late reading it, which is a trait I cherish in a book and is also hard to pull off in a book with such heavy themes -- brainwashing, abuse, reproductive coercion, war,.... And the characters were so well articulated. I really live for books where characters seem like actual humans who are capable of being really truly horrible to each other and also capable of kindness and growth.
