Some Desperate Glory

My sister got my husband a pile of books for Christmas, and Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh was in that pile. I’m not ordinarily one for space operas, but I’d just finished The Deep Sky and thought eh, why not?

I’m glad that I very unenthusiastically decided to pick this one up, because it was a banger. Some Desperate Glory is the story of Valkyr (yes, really), a teenage girl who lives on a rebel human space station after an alien race has destroyed Earth—and all 14 billion people living on it. She’s a Warbreed, which means that she was genetically engineered for battle, although that technology has been lost and now humans have to reproduce the old-fashioned way. With her “Mess,” a group of several other girls that she lives with, Kyr has been training for war since she was seven; now, as a teenager, it’s time for her to learn what her adult job assignment will be. But instead of being selected for the army, like she wants, Kyr is chosen for the Nursery, where she will be expected to pop out as many babies as possible.

Even worse, Kyr’s beloved brother Magnus is sent as an assassin to one of humanity’s remaining colony planets—and he’s not expected to return alive. Kyr basically says “Fuck that!” to all of it, which starts us off on an adventure through timey-wimey and space.

I really liked this book on a number of levels, but three immediately spring to mind. First of all, Kyr is a perfect fascist monster: She does not question anything about her world until everything falls apart for her, because fascism benefits her personally. She’s exceptional at everything her leaders have to throw at her, and because she’s so good at it all, she doesn’t understand how anyone else could fall short of expectations—and she torments the other girls in her Mess when they do. I found her unbearable but highly believable. Second, the aliens were actually alien without being like, giant bugs. They were not humanoid at all, but I didn't have to put up with enormous cockroaches, so I was down. And finally, humans are actually the big bad in this universe: They are larger and stronger and faster than the aliens, which is why the aliens decided they had to go. It makes a nice change from the sci-fi that I grew up with, where humans were inevitably the runts of the litter.

The only real flaw in the book is that frankly, it could have been longer. There are some beats that don’t really land because Tesh is rushing things along, and I’m just like girl, it’s a space opera, up your word count! No one will judge you if this goes on for an extra hundred pages! But overall, I had a lot of fun with this one. 4/5