A review by azurahh
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

adventurous challenging fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Holy fucking SHIT. 
This is the best book I've read so far this year (it's only March to be fair) (supplanting Dauntless as #1 book club read sorry Elisa).
Some Desperate Glory is a space opera centring around Kyr, a loyal soldier who has just come of age on a space station run like a cult. She is literally the worst person alive (affectionate) with bucketloads of internalized misogyny and homophobia and just generally brainwashed cult brain. When she's assigned to have babies until she dies she escapes and learns that there's more to life than her white supremacist death cult and actually they kind of suck! 5/5 no notes. 
If you liked Gideon in GTN and Nona in NTN and even some of the mind-fuckery in HTN, this is the book for you. *Bestie says: Ender's Game (minus the homophobic author) meets Locked Tomb (unverified opinion because she says I wouldn't like Ender's Game in the year 2024 lmfao).
Our MC, Kyr, is deeply, deeply unlikeable at the start but I encourage you to push past that until she starts on her ~cult deprogramming journey because it's a really good arc. Overall I would say give it a good crack until you get at least halfway through part two. She's a truly flawed and kind of awful MC but she does in fact come out okay! We love to see it. Other than that the cast includes: a computer nerd twink, a sad little alien, a haunted brother the size of a house (Ortus-coded), and a nasty little dictator with a god complex (Jod-coded).
This is by far the closest a book has come to the feeling I got reading Gideon and I made some memes on the topic.
Kyr 🤝 Gideon
  • Obsessed with being soldiers for their colonizing/ethnonationalist government
  • Forced into critical thinking about society (😭)
  • Live with their closest friend/worst enemy/biggest rival
  • Dumb as shit about their crushes on girls
  • Sort of weirdly obsessed with a fragile person with big eyes
Aside from that. I thought this was one of the best social science fiction books I've read recently--it's a lot more challenging (or at least deals with broader societal questions) than e.g., Becky Chambers (who I love), but it has a similar feel to some of their books.
It's oddly funny in places--not overtly meme-atic like TLT, but a lot of that unexpected juxtaposition style of humor similar to Tamsyn Muir comes through.
Unfortunately almost everything good and interesting about this book is a major spoiler so it's very hard to rec it without spoiling the best parts! After a certain point you just start sending your best friend the word "scream" over and over again until you finish the book and die and if that isn't a recommendation I don't know what is.
Recommended for fans of: The Locked Tomb/Tamsyn Muir (obviously lol), Juno of Taris by Fleur Beale, and A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers.
Content warnings are listed before the book begins and you'll want to pay attention to them. 
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