Some Desperate Glory

After just two novels (this and The Incandescent) Tesh has immediately made my list of preorder/instant buy on release authors. This book starts off with a certain set of pretty familiar tropes but very soon it’s clear that there’s more to this world, and not just in that other trope-y way (although, yes, that too). At each stage of this novel’s plot I had no idea where it was going to go next, but each time I was satisfied with what did. Tesh set up a premise that, for me, didn’t have a clear morally-just outcome, and then navigated it through some captivating scenarios to a pretty satisfying conclusion.

One thing that struck me as I finished this book is that I am so often bored out of my skull by stories that are close to this: galaxy-wide stakes, hand-wavy sci-fi devices with minimal grounding rules, all approaching a big race-against-the-clock climax; these things tend to pull back from the characters, especially in the third act, and in doing so they lose my interest. I don’t think that happened here. Maybe because I was very bought-in; maybe because Tesh does well to keep the focus on the characters. Certainly because there are very few drawn-out combat scenes.

I think it was really interesting to watch Kyr’s character develop slowly over the course of the novel, and especially in the end of the first act, when it kind of becomes clear that she is, at that point, not really a “good guy.” Her attitudes, her indoctrination, encountering the truths out there, is a fascinating thing to watch, and while I think it happened a little quickly, I think Tesh did very well to never make it so plain as “Kyr was wrong and now she’s learning what’s right.”

My major gripe is not very major at all: as the end approached, and it looked like Kyr might die in accomplishing her goal, I was disappointed—but then, when she was snatched from that fate, it felt a little cheap too. But not massively. In the end, I absolutely loved this novel.

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