Book Review: Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh
Science Fiction: Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh
Kyr was born and raised to be a weapon. The Majo have destroyed the planet Earth, and a last remnant of survivors lives on Gaia, a barren rock, struggling both to survive and to get their revenge. Kyr has worked her entire young life to prepare herself for war. Her test and training scores are among the best ever, male or female. She has worked hard to beat the scores set by her sister, Ursa, a quest driven more urgently by Ursa’s betrayal and flight from Gaia. She refuses to be less than the sister who betrayed her own people.
When a Majo ship is captured, Kyr meets the sole occupant, an alien named Yiso. Yiso is small and slender, particularly beside the genetically enhanced body of Kyr and the other children of Earth. Far from being the menacing figure of legend, Yiso is comparatively weak and timid. If this is the best among the aliens, how did the humans lose the war?
Kyr’s brother Mags is sent on a suicide mission while Kyr herself is assigned to a much more domestic role, a role she believes she is particularly ill-suited for. In a desperate attempt to rescue her brother and to escape her own unwelcome fate, Kyr flees the outpost with Yiso and Mags’s friend Avi, and together they travel to the human-colonized planet Chrysothemis.
Emily Tesh writes a space novel that is part thriller, part mystery, and all adventure. Kyr is perhaps the ultimate bad-ass. She is a warrior who has trained obsessively to be the ultimate human weapon. Somehow, though, her training has completely neglected areas of human feeling: love, compassion, understanding, thoughtfulness. She is a jerk. People do not like her, and she doesn’t really care at first. By the time she recognizes that she has a problem, it may be too late. She is driven by hate and arrogance: hatred for the aliens that cracked open the Earth like an egg and killed over 14 billion people, and arrogance toward those she considers her lessers–which is just about everybody. It would require something unthinkable to alter Kyr’s mindset.
Tesh deeply explores what hate can do to a person and to a group. She also writes with compassion toward her completely uncompassionate protagonist. Kyr was raised to be exactly what she has become. Can she–can anyone–overcome their upbringing, find redemption, change the course of their own history?
Can they do it without their world ending?
Our thanks to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers for our copy of Some Desperate Glory, provided so we could participate in this blog tour. (I don’t hold Tracy to any fault for NetGalley not providing my copy for my March 29 review until April.) The opinions here are solely those of Scintilla. For other perspectives, check out the other bloggers on this tour.
Book Review: Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh