Name: Some Desperate Glory
ISBN: 9781250834980

Emily Tesh

From Astounding Award Winner and Crawford Award Finalist Emily Tesh "Masterful, audacious storytelling. Relentless, unsentimental, a completely wild ride."—Tamsyn Muir While we live, the enemy shall fear us. Since she was born, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the majoda their victory over humanity. They are what’s left. They are what must survive. Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. When Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons until she dies trying, she knows must take humanity's revenge into her own hands. Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, Kyr escapes from everything she’s known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined. A 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.

Some Desperate Glory

Some Desperate Glory starting out strong with a trigger warning.

Katheryn

Some Desperate Glory contains sexist, homophobic, transphobic, racist, and ableist attitudes; sexual assault, including discussion of forced pregnancy;violence; child abuse; radicalization as child abuse; genocide; suicidal ideation; and suicide

It's adult Skyward but it's very good at being that. It made me think a lot more and many of the characters were terribly frustrating in a real way.

Treyden Talbot

This was fine. It… really hits you over the head with it’s point(s) like, repeatedly. So If you prefer your sci-fi to be a little more flirty with it’s like, morality, maybe a bit more coy about the whole “blinkered militarization and extermination bad” or “revenge not always best” or “women can be more than make baby factory” than it might be a bit too ham-fisted for you. But if you want to feel like 

 and could follow along and like keep up the entire time 

 you think women are people, and that lesbian relationships are also, not particularly deep, then this could be a breezy read for you. For me this felt like sci-fi 101 or like, “how to get your boyfriend to stop listening to Joe Rogan and watch Star Trek with you instead, Step 2”

Apiecalypse Jen

This was fine. It… really hits you over the head with it’s point(s) like, repeatedly. So If you prefer your sci-fi to be a little more flirty with it’s like, morality, maybe a bit more coy about the whole “blinkered militarization and extermination bad” or “revenge not always best” or “women can be more than make baby factory” than it might be a bit too ham-fisted for you. But if you want to feel like really smart because you got all the themes and could follow along and like keep up the entire time and you think women are people, and that lesbian relationships are also, not particularly deep, then this could be a breezy read for you. For me this felt like sci-fi 101 or like, “how to get your boyfriend to stop listening to Joe Rogan and watch Star Trek with you instead, Step 2”

I went with audio for this, and I’ll tell you, Sena Bryer knocked it out of the park for me. Some really good and completely different voices in here.

This is an interesting concept. Earth was lost, and those on Gaea are raised to train with only one thing in mind, revenge. It’s an endless war. But when the main character, Kyr finds out that her brother has gone “rogue” and that she has been sentenced to work in the nursery, a near death sentence regardless of her being a top solider, things start to become a little clearer.

This is almost like an Inception-y, Time Travel creating changes like in Loki, multiversal kind of mixture that had a great pace to it. Can the past change the future if it’s the one that already exists? The twists are present, and they’re interesting, I just kind of felt like maybe the execution was a tad off. I found things that I thought were cool or interesting, but felt like they didn’t exactly pan out, and I wasn’t as engaged as I should have been.

The idea of the nursery as a whole, a set of selected women that were chosen for life to birth the next generation of humans, could have been set up to make a hell of a statement…but it kind of just is what it is—lacking commentary? Even in the future, during an all-out war for survival, even while being the top marks solider out of all the women, you can still be seen as just a womb. And while that is kind of what it’s saying it also felt kind of flat, like they didn’t try to really get the point across. It also kind of felt off putting to me that Kyr’s brother, the large and muscly super solider was weird and different, and the way that it was played off was that he was different simply because he was gay? At least that’s how it feels. It needed to be deeper, or to not be there at all for me.

The other main issue I had, was that many, if not most, of the characters are just genuinely unlikable. It’s hard to be truly surprised, heartened, or heart broken with the twists when you don’t feel enough for those it’s happening too. So while there were things that kept me going, kept me listening on to the end, I just feel kind of somewhere in the middle on this one.

C. J. Daley 

I went with audio for this, and I’ll tell you, Sena Bryer knocked it out of the park for me. Some really good and completely different voices in here.

This is an interesting concept. Earth was lost, and those on Gaea are raised to train with only one thing in mind, revenge. It’s an endless war. But when the main character, Kyr finds out that her brother has gone “rogue” and that she has been sentenced to work in the nursery, a near death sentence regardless of her being a top solider, things start to become a little clearer.

This is almost like an Inception-y, Time Travel creating changes like in Loki, multiversal kind of mixture that had a great pace to it. Can the past change the future if it’s the one that already exists? The twists are present, and they’re interesting, I just kind of felt like maybe the execution was a tad off. I found things that I thought were cool or interesting, but felt like they didn’t exactly pan out, and I wasn’t as engaged as I should have been.

The idea of the nursery as a whole, a set of selected women that were chosen for life to birth the next generation of humans, could have been set up to make a hell of a statement…but it kind of just is what it is—lacking commentary? Even in the future, during an all-out war for survival, even while being the top marks solider out of all the women, you can still be seen as just a womb. And while that is kind of what it’s saying it also felt kind of flat, like they didn’t try to really get the point across. It also kind of felt off putting to me that Kyr’s brother, the large and muscly super solider was weird and different, and the way that it was played off was that he was different simply because he was gay? At least that’s how it feels. It needed to be deeper, or to not be there at all for me.

The other main issue I had, was that many, if not most, of the characters are just genuinely unlikable. It’s hard to be truly surprised, heartened, or heart broken with the twists when you don’t feel enough for those it’s happening too. So while there were things that kept me going, kept me listening on to the end, I just feel kind of somewhere in the middle on this one.

envee

slaaaayyyyy but could've been more nuanced tho

Typical Sci-Fi but with lots of twists and an interesting take on 'what could be'- situations and how the knowledge thereof would influence a person and help them grow. 

Jasmin

lol. even as a lover of like, space gun shit and time loop plotlines, this is so! painfully! didactic! and! shallow! reads like a ruthlessly commercially-minded distillation of the most popular AO3 tags! absolutely transparent 'make reader feel like real nice guy' morality! like if you're gonna do 'Ender's Game but it's Mass Effect it's the 21st century so we know about gay people now' you should at a bare minimum do it well enough that the reader doesn't spend the whole thing like, man, actually, I wish I was reading Ender's Game right about now, that's what I wish I was doing. 

also frankly the f/f relationship is so shittily written in, the putative love interest so cardboard and so obviously uninteresting to the author and such an insulting sop to Women* that I think I preferred it when we had never heard of gay people. writing a protagonist this blinkered and tunnel-visioned is ofc always a bit of a risk, and risk-taking is good! not complaining about that! BUT — I think it comes at the cost of making the setting, etc. feel absolutely paper-thin and un-lived-in, which it does. 

* we have the protagonist, right, essentially a highly shooty individual — and then we have, like, 'it's ok to not be a Badass (you're boring tho)' over here 

also I feel like I am always complaining about this in books but: we are in the far future, the earth has been destroyed, we have had vast, civilisation-warping amounts of contact with alien civilisations, but we're going to use 'queer' and 'enby' etc. etc. 2023 language to talk about absolutely everything, because obviously we have finally reached the perfect apotheosis of theories of gender and sexuality at this exact moment. like ok!! ok!!!! just not totally plausible to me in light of how much the language around this stuff has changed within my own tiny little lifetime, this is an area around which cultural norms can change at lightning speed, feels thoroughly short-sighted to imagine that we are at the kind of second-order inflection point from which things will never change so quickly again, but idk man! 

but ultimately the thing is that this is, tbh, a pretty good currentyear sff book; representative of the genre as it stands, better than most in seeming to actually countenance a sense of literary and intellectual history, usw. but don't you find that depressing? don't you?

Hard to review this one because of the triggering nature of some of the content, but still excellently done. If you like The Expanse & Mass Effect & multiverse concepts and you can stomach a hellish future for women, give this a read.

Liz Griffin

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 the highly anticipated debut novel from Astounding Award and World Fantasy Award-Winner, Emily Tesh; a thrillingly told space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and who you must become when every choice is stripped from you.

~Anna~

I was here for the ride and it certainly gave me one. Reading a few reviews to temper my expectations probably helped a lot, too.

But I’ll admit it, I teared up twice and I fell for this book. Sue me

If I could rate this book a 6 I would. I was sent it as a part of of my Illumicrate subscription and I am stunned. Even if you are not a huge scifi reader it is a phenomenal book

Elizabeth Denny

What started as an investing, albeit frustrating, run-of-the-mill sci-fi struggle gradually evolved into an engaging, driving, and introspective novel.