Mini-Review: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Tordotcom

Publication Date: April 11th, 2023

Hardcover. 448 pages.

About Some Desperate Glory:

"While we live, the enemy shall fear us.

All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the all-powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the Majoda their victory over humanity.

They are what’s left. They are what must survive. Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. But when Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons until she dies trying, she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands.

Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, she escapes from everything she’s ever known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined."

Some Desperate Glory is a fast-paced sci-fi that explores a variety of timely themes and ideas and is sure to keep readers on the edge of their seat. Unfortunately, I did not find myself enjoying this book even half as much as I'd hoped to.

What I liked: The general setting and premise of Some Desperate Glory is really cool and I liked exploring it. There is a lot of world-building and although I have some issues with the world-building, I still found myself fascinated with how Tesh crafted this world and all its different parts and its history. There's also some fun twists that are actually quite twisty, and the pacing is generally pretty fast-paced and keeps the story moving. I enjoyed learning about the different roles each of the characters had and how this defined their lives, as well as getting to dig deeper into things that aren't quite as they seem. Despite the fact that I disliked many of the characters including our protagonist (which I'll mention more in the 'didn't like' section), I appreciated that Emily Tesh did seem to write fairly good character development across most of her characters, and that this helped them feel a bit more like real people. 

What I didn't like: I just couldn't get behind any of these characters, really. Kyr is one of the most unlikable narrators I've ever read, and it is not in a good way. She was genuinely so aggravating that I nearly DNF'd this book a number of times. I also found that the world-building, although there was a lot of it, wasn't really given much depth. We learn about this world and everything going on in it, but I felt it was still overall confusing to try to understand everything, and the execution just lacked depth and cohesion. I also felt that some of the plotting was a bit rough and the story was a little choppy and hard for me to really find myself immersed in it, which did affect my reading experience. Lastly, I liked that this book tackled a lot of intense topics, but I don't think it did so in the in-depth manner they required, which I found slightly frustrating. 

Overall, I know Some Desperate Glory has an audience for it and those people will love it. For me, I didn't enjoy this book all that much, though I can definitely acknowledge some stronger aspects of it. I've given it 2.75 stars!

*I received a copy of Some Desperate Glory courtesy of the publisher in exchange for an honest review.*

Buy the book: Amazon | Bookshop.org