Dee 📖 (book aspect) reviewed Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Some Desperate Glory
5 stars
On the surface, this may seem like military SF, but really, it's more about trauma, and radicalization, and cults, and personal growth. It's well-written, too. When following the perspective of an initially angry teenager as she then changes as a person, it is possible to lay things on too thick, but Tesh manages to do it just right.
This sort of shifting perspective also makes the worldbuilding of the setting interesting. The view of the novel's world is colored by the characters' biases, and how those biases shift, and those shifts play a role in the overall plot. The overall plot is perhaps a bit of the standard SF fare, but the way it is told through the arcs of the characters involved is what makes it compelling.
This book stands out in both its approach to the kind of plot and setting it employs, and also in doing what …
On the surface, this may seem like military SF, but really, it's more about trauma, and radicalization, and cults, and personal growth. It's well-written, too. When following the perspective of an initially angry teenager as she then changes as a person, it is possible to lay things on too thick, but Tesh manages to do it just right.
This sort of shifting perspective also makes the worldbuilding of the setting interesting. The view of the novel's world is colored by the characters' biases, and how those biases shift, and those shifts play a role in the overall plot. The overall plot is perhaps a bit of the standard SF fare, but the way it is told through the arcs of the characters involved is what makes it compelling.
This book stands out in both its approach to the kind of plot and setting it employs, and also in doing what other SF novels may attempt to do, but in this case doing it exceptionally well.
