Breakaway Books

Authored by Emily Tesh; Published 2023; Science Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

Some Desperate Glory made me realize just how much I love a good time travel/ alternative timeline plot. I know, it’s exceedingly difficult to create a plot around a system of time travel with consistent rules. But, as a human being, it’s hard not to wonder what would have happened if you made just one little decision differently.

Except, in Some Desperate Glory, it’s not just one little decision. Set in a universe where the earth has been destroyed, it follows one of the few surviving humans Kyr as she trains up on an outer space colony containing the last rebel faction to fight the majoda, the alien race that defeated the human race and destroyed Earth. While she hopes to be a warrior for the colony, she is instead assigned to breed male warrior stock. Devastated by this turn of fate, she is equally shocked by her twin Magnus’s refusal of his own combat assignment. As she seeks to understand what happened to him, she finds out more than she bargained for and a surprising (time traveling) choice is placed before her.

The novel is set in outer space, but deals with a fundamental question of humanity on Earth: How much is life worth, and what will we allow ourselves to sacrifice to preserve mankind? In some ways, it reminded me of some fantasy young adult favorites, because at its core are idealistic adolescents dealing with these questions for the first time and truly grappling with the question of what makes one life worth more than another. They struggle with complicity in a system larger than themselves that seems far more brutal than they are willing to be individually.

I found author Tesh to be enormously creative; I loved the way that the majoda were depicted and especially how they perceived humanity’s strengths and weaknesses. I delighted in the way that she took Kyr through a heart-wrenching evolution from a character that I was somewhat disgusted with to one that I aspired to emulate. All of her allies, her siblings, and her classmates felt real to me, even if they weren’t all likable. If there is a weak point, the villain who is ultimately unmasked could have used a tad more development—there were moments when I felt that he was brutally villainous without explanation for his cruelty.

Some Desperate Glory is a journey, several gut-punches rolled into a compact book. It made me empathize with characters I didn’t want to empathize with at all. In spite of the fact that it’s set in an alternate reality, off in space, it made me think a lot about living right here, right now.