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Dec. 9th, 2023 09:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsSeveral friends around DW have been very kind about writing up my book recently which has renewed my determination This Weekend to finally write up a few books that came out this year that I am deeply biased about.
I will start with Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory, which I have already seen discussed several places around my dwlist -- personally I first read it in draft in the summer of 2022 and thought it was brilliant then, and it's only gotten better in the iterations since.
Some Desperate Glory is written from the strict POV of Kyr, a teenager who has been growing up in a small fascist enclave of surviving humans after a devastating space war, which the humans lost, resulting in the destruction of Earth and the loss of billions of people. Everyone's miserable in space fascist enclave, including Kyr's beloved twin brother Magnus; however, Kyr has not actually noticed this because she is Winning at Teen Space Fascism and as long as she's Winning everything is Fine. It is only when she starts to feel the boot on her own neck that her rock-solid worldview begins to slowly crumble, resulting in a wild expedition with one (1) differently miserable and terrible space teen and one (1) fragile captive alien, that .... leads to Major Problems, because when you unleash a couple of traumatized brainwashed teenagers who are trained to do nothing but destroy into a completely different context than anything they've ever experienced they are not going to make good decisions about it.
The thing that I love most about this book is Kyr & Kyr's voice, because one of the things I find most satisfying in the world is to read about someone who believes something with their whole heart very slowly change their mind about it, kicking and screaming the whole time. I can't remember the last time I read a book with a character who starts out as much of a horrible bulldozer as Kyr -- not just informed-horrible, lip-service horrible, but on the page being a petty bully without ever thinking of herself as anything other than heroic because all her actions are perfectly consistent with the worldview that's been presented to her -- so that when things do start to get through to her and she finally starts making different choices it's profoundly satisfying to me, I love her so much.
But the thing that I think actually makes this book brilliant is the structure; specifics of which I can't really talk about without major spoilers.
I love a timeloop structure that forces characters to confront themselves and their failings, and I love characters who can't be forced to make better decisions until they've already made every wrong decision it's possible to make -- I love that it takes literally destroying the whole universe for Kyr and Avi to understand the ways in which their worldview is warped, I love that Avi still fucks it all up in every universe, I love that in the end it's not Kyr remaking the world but Kyr remaking herself that allows for things to change, from the personal to the big and back down to the personal again.
I had no idea what the shape of this book was going to be the first time I read it for the first ... maybe hundred pages or so, and every time the direction in which it went gave me the surprise-and-delight feeling of something clicking into place in a way that I would personally never have envisioned. I am so in awe of people who can pull this off so huge hats off to Emily Tesh for this, a book that was not like anything else I read in 2022 or 2023 either.
I will start with Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory, which I have already seen discussed several places around my dwlist -- personally I first read it in draft in the summer of 2022 and thought it was brilliant then, and it's only gotten better in the iterations since.
Some Desperate Glory is written from the strict POV of Kyr, a teenager who has been growing up in a small fascist enclave of surviving humans after a devastating space war, which the humans lost, resulting in the destruction of Earth and the loss of billions of people. Everyone's miserable in space fascist enclave, including Kyr's beloved twin brother Magnus; however, Kyr has not actually noticed this because she is Winning at Teen Space Fascism and as long as she's Winning everything is Fine. It is only when she starts to feel the boot on her own neck that her rock-solid worldview begins to slowly crumble, resulting in a wild expedition with one (1) differently miserable and terrible space teen and one (1) fragile captive alien, that .... leads to Major Problems, because when you unleash a couple of traumatized brainwashed teenagers who are trained to do nothing but destroy into a completely different context than anything they've ever experienced they are not going to make good decisions about it.
The thing that I love most about this book is Kyr & Kyr's voice, because one of the things I find most satisfying in the world is to read about someone who believes something with their whole heart very slowly change their mind about it, kicking and screaming the whole time. I can't remember the last time I read a book with a character who starts out as much of a horrible bulldozer as Kyr -- not just informed-horrible, lip-service horrible, but on the page being a petty bully without ever thinking of herself as anything other than heroic because all her actions are perfectly consistent with the worldview that's been presented to her -- so that when things do start to get through to her and she finally starts making different choices it's profoundly satisfying to me, I love her so much.
But the thing that I think actually makes this book brilliant is the structure; specifics of which I can't really talk about without major spoilers.
I love a timeloop structure that forces characters to confront themselves and their failings, and I love characters who can't be forced to make better decisions until they've already made every wrong decision it's possible to make -- I love that it takes literally destroying the whole universe for Kyr and Avi to understand the ways in which their worldview is warped, I love that Avi still fucks it all up in every universe, I love that in the end it's not Kyr remaking the world but Kyr remaking herself that allows for things to change, from the personal to the big and back down to the personal again.
I had no idea what the shape of this book was going to be the first time I read it for the first ... maybe hundred pages or so, and every time the direction in which it went gave me the surprise-and-delight feeling of something clicking into place in a way that I would personally never have envisioned. I am so in awe of people who can pull this off so huge hats off to Emily Tesh for this, a book that was not like anything else I read in 2022 or 2023 either.
