While there was a lot I couldn’t picture - mostly the engines, the Wisdom, the shadowy jump things - I didn’t really let that be a stumbling block in the enjoyment of it all. I think we’re not given a choice on whether or not to like them. Maybe that was hindered by the single POV and because of how Kyr looks at the world in the early chapters? When we finally do understand more of those around us, it’s a little too late to be invested in them.

I can’t really claim to have enjoyed any other character, though. Because we see her work through it, re-evaluate, and own it. Most of the time in these extreme perspective shifts, breaking away from the mentality or the indoctrination or the belief, whatever, it doesn’t always feel genuine. Everything she experienced, and then re-experienced, felt true. But through Kyr, our main character, we have what feels like such a painfully authentic character arc that somehow things do still feel fresh. In some ways what Some Desperate Glory offers isn’t anything particularly new. Events take a turn that definitely shocked me and also very much intrigued me - even though the very presence of this element is part of what I’m trying not too look too hard at for fear of it all disintegrating. I will say that the way this story went wasn’t remotely what I expected.

But what keeps it from being actually great are the bits that if you look too hard at.

Because even though this took me a week to read, the good parts were pretty good. And one of those things, like is typical for me, is whether I need to round this up or not. This book had me feeling all sorts of things. But when Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons until she dies trying, she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands.Īlongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, she escapes from everything she’s ever known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined.Ī thrillingly told queer space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and who you must become when every choice is stripped from you, Some Desperate Glory is award-winning author Emily Tesh’s highly anticipated debut novel. Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the all-powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the Majoda their victory over humanity. All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth.

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh