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A review by atticmoth
Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders
3.0
I’ll start this out by saying I’m not into reading YA books which may have affected a lot of my review. I think that if I had kids I would let them read this book and in that sense it’s a very successful YA novel but for my own tastes and biases I didn’t really enjoy it.
Victories Greater Than Death is basically like Ender’s Game if it wasn’t fash, with a little Star Trek TNG and Netflix’s Voltron thrown in. It’s a fast moving space opera narrative that’s a quick read. I was familiar with Anders’ All The Birds In The Sky, which I LOVED, though it also felt a little YA-ish, and in both her strength is her worldbuilding. The concept behind the (for lack of a better word) Big Bad is something I’ve never come across in sci-fi, and I wish she had done more with it, though it leaves a story open for sequels (no spoilers!) The story does a good job juggling lots of concepts and a pretty big cast of characters, all of which have discernible arcs, without losing the reader, and that in itself is a feat.
Something that made the prose feel juvenile was that it seemed like a millennial/gen X’er trying to approximate how the younger end of gen Z speaks, which is something I doubt even I could do (as someone on the cusp of millennial and Gen-Z). It’s a very progressive story with lots of minority representation which is part of the reason I said kids should read it, but the way it’s done feels a little hamfisted to me. For example, all the aliens introduce themselves with their gender pronouns, which made me laugh out loud the first time they did it. Maybe I’m a bad person for laughing because it seems well-intentioned… but at the same time the only non-binary characters were space aliens. It’s culturally diverse, but at the same time there’s an alien named Thot, which pretty much sums it up.
Victories Greater Than Death is basically like Ender’s Game if it wasn’t fash, with a little Star Trek TNG and Netflix’s Voltron thrown in. It’s a fast moving space opera narrative that’s a quick read. I was familiar with Anders’ All The Birds In The Sky, which I LOVED, though it also felt a little YA-ish, and in both her strength is her worldbuilding. The concept behind the (for lack of a better word) Big Bad is something I’ve never come across in sci-fi, and I wish she had done more with it, though it leaves a story open for sequels (no spoilers!) The story does a good job juggling lots of concepts and a pretty big cast of characters, all of which have discernible arcs, without losing the reader, and that in itself is a feat.
Something that made the prose feel juvenile was that it seemed like a millennial/gen X’er trying to approximate how the younger end of gen Z speaks, which is something I doubt even I could do (as someone on the cusp of millennial and Gen-Z). It’s a very progressive story with lots of minority representation which is part of the reason I said kids should read it, but the way it’s done feels a little hamfisted to me. For example, all the aliens introduce themselves with their gender pronouns, which made me laugh out loud the first time they did it. Maybe I’m a bad person for laughing because it seems well-intentioned… but at the same time the only non-binary characters were space aliens. It’s culturally diverse, but at the same time there’s an alien named Thot, which pretty much sums it up.