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A review by capesandcovers
Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders
1.0
I was so set to love this series, but instead I'm going to be DNFing book one 60% of the way into it. The whole concept was right up my alley, with a queer found family, sapphic romance AND it's a space opera. When I say I was excited for it I really mean it too - I had been planning on binge reading the first two books since the finale is about to come out, and then reading it.
Moving on, there are a few things that stopped me from continuing. The first is the scene/time skips. I'd literally go from reading a paragraph about the human crew either fighting or angsting over something, and then the next paragraph I'd suddenly be in the middle of an action scene. The first few times I thought that maybe I had missed something from accidentally turning forward too many pages, but that wasn't the case. Maybe it's just because it's an arc, but there was no warning or sign that these were going to happen within the format of the book either. Because of this, the whole thing felt choppy and was constantly throwing me out of the story's flow.
Next was the development of, well. Everything, I guess. While I loved certain aspects of the world such as the extraordinarily creative aliens and cultures, as well as the pronoun introductions, most of it was underdeveloped or info-dumped. The relationships in the novel were nonexistent, there was no development of characters outside of Tina and a bit of development for Rachel from the start of the novel. Besides that, almost nobody had any development, which made it difficult to care about what was happening to them during their internal and external conflicts. While I understand why Anders decided to use Tina as an alien wikipedia, there needed to be some things that the reader learned about space that didn't come from her spouting this knowledge like a teenage space Alexa. Everything was done in a "Tell, not show" kind of way and it felt like an endless stream of info dumping because of it. There was no development of characters' relationships either, besides Tina and Rachel's at the start. The focus of the novel was about the earthling teenagers, and since most of them felt like one dimensional characters with a single trait, I held no attachment to them. The romance between Tina and Elza was terrible as well, it came out of literally nowhere. It went from Elza complaining, having constant bad attitude and picking fights with Tina (on the occasion she was even around), to Tina deciding she wanted to kiss her after like, one conversation. Elza was mean to her and the relationship felt so sudden and unhealthy that I couldn't even be excited over the ship.
And finally, the writing was just... strange. It felt like it was from a book aimed at younger teens in the early '00s and not in a good way. It felt like a giant anti-bullying ad (making the Elza/Tina relationship even stranger), where the teens were just saying very unrealistic things about how bullying was bad, unprompted. You know those promotional ads or comics where it was to promote being kind to one another back in the day to little kids? It felt like that, but for teens.
Victories Greater than Death was a book I had really been looking forward to reading, and I'm so disappointed that things turned out this way. It had really had some potential at the start, but just continuously fell in quality as things progressed. I'm sure there are people who will like this book, but it felt condescending to it's audience and there were just too many issues for me to overlook.
Moving on, there are a few things that stopped me from continuing. The first is the scene/time skips. I'd literally go from reading a paragraph about the human crew either fighting or angsting over something, and then the next paragraph I'd suddenly be in the middle of an action scene. The first few times I thought that maybe I had missed something from accidentally turning forward too many pages, but that wasn't the case. Maybe it's just because it's an arc, but there was no warning or sign that these were going to happen within the format of the book either. Because of this, the whole thing felt choppy and was constantly throwing me out of the story's flow.
Next was the development of, well. Everything, I guess. While I loved certain aspects of the world such as the extraordinarily creative aliens and cultures, as well as the pronoun introductions, most of it was underdeveloped or info-dumped. The relationships in the novel were nonexistent, there was no development of characters outside of Tina and a bit of development for Rachel from the start of the novel. Besides that, almost nobody had any development, which made it difficult to care about what was happening to them during their internal and external conflicts. While I understand why Anders decided to use Tina as an alien wikipedia, there needed to be some things that the reader learned about space that didn't come from her spouting this knowledge like a teenage space Alexa. Everything was done in a "Tell, not show" kind of way and it felt like an endless stream of info dumping because of it. There was no development of characters' relationships either, besides Tina and Rachel's at the start. The focus of the novel was about the earthling teenagers, and since most of them felt like one dimensional characters with a single trait, I held no attachment to them. The romance between Tina and Elza was terrible as well, it came out of literally nowhere. It went from Elza complaining, having constant bad attitude and picking fights with Tina (on the occasion she was even around), to Tina deciding she wanted to kiss her after like, one conversation. Elza was mean to her and the relationship felt so sudden and unhealthy that I couldn't even be excited over the ship.
And finally, the writing was just... strange. It felt like it was from a book aimed at younger teens in the early '00s and not in a good way. It felt like a giant anti-bullying ad (making the Elza/Tina relationship even stranger), where the teens were just saying very unrealistic things about how bullying was bad, unprompted. You know those promotional ads or comics where it was to promote being kind to one another back in the day to little kids? It felt like that, but for teens.
Victories Greater than Death was a book I had really been looking forward to reading, and I'm so disappointed that things turned out this way. It had really had some potential at the start, but just continuously fell in quality as things progressed. I'm sure there are people who will like this book, but it felt condescending to it's audience and there were just too many issues for me to overlook.