Book Review: A Tour-de-Force Debut from Emily Tesh

Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh (Tordotcom)

After a devastating alien attack destroys Earth, a handfulof survivors cling to the hope of revenge on Gaea Station, a satellite cobbled fromthe few remaining warships. A generation later, young people have been geneticallymodified and rigorously trained to be “warbreed” fighters, huge, strong, and…obedient.Normal human teens are assigned to other tasks churning out babies to keephumankind going. Warbreed Kyr (Valkyrie) has spent her entire life training toface “the Wisdom,” the reality-shaping alien weapon that doomed Earth. Sheexcels in every physical test, she drives her lesser mess-mates mercilessly,and she has no emotional ties to anyone except her brother. She fully expectsto be given a prized post…but Command has other ideas. Instead, her brother issent on a death mission and she is consigned to the Nursery to bear sons forGaea Station until she dies an early death.

At first, I found Kyr a highly unsympathetic character.She’s arrogant, entitled, and generally a self-centered bully. She’sunthinkingly cruel to the helpless young alien whose ship is captured. Inshort, I didn’t like her at all. But I kept reading on the strength of theprose and the hope that she would eventually get her comeuppance. And then theplot spins around in another direction…and yet another…

Refusing her Nursery assignment, Kyr ends up on the run withher brother, the alien, and her brother’s unrequited crush, a brilliant but psychopathiccomputer whiz (who is also a boy, but queer relationships are forbidden on GaeaStation because of the crushing need to increase the human population.)

Their flight takes them to a planet inhabited by both humansand aliens, where lush green, fresh air, blue skies, and joyful play contrastwith the bleak sterility of her previous life. Not only that, she encountersher older sister, who was supposed to be dead, and her nephew, fathered by theautocratic Commander whom Kyr had once worshipped. Faced with the undeniablereality that the universe is vaster and more wonderful than she imagined, Kyrbegins to question everything she has been taught, even her own memories. Shestarts asking who she would be if Earth had not been destroyed or if theCommander had not been a power-hungry tyrant bent on retaliation. If she’dgrown up in an enriched, natural environment. If she’d been allowed to loveanyone—starting with herself.

By this time, I was thoroughly hooked. With each deviationfrom the opening scenario, the entire universe changes—and Kyr with it. Theauthor brilliantly takes us inside each iteration of Kyr, the good and the bad,the memories and the blindnesses. It’s a tour-de-force that kept me turningpages and falling in love with a true heroine.