Some Desperate Glory
Jun. 19th, 2023 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraSome Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh, 2023 novel. Child soldier comes of age, questions what she's been taught. I really liked this - without getting spoilery, I thought it was very nicely constructed, good pacing, satisfying story. It's very closely in dialogue with Ender's Game (okay, maybe not so much a "dialogue" as "grabbing it by the lapels and shouting in its face") and maybe also a certain debate in Marvel fandom circa 2019, and, uh, videogames in general?
Spoilers At least, I thought the whole question of "what point do you go back to, what would you try to change" had some interesting resonance with the whole "reverse the Snap but preserve the timeline vs prevent the Snap and give up the timeline" question. As a piece of one-iteration timeloop fiction, of course Tesh has to come back and do the third act as a corrected first act - the fantasy of the do-over, the practice run! - but ouch, the Earth, wow! I admire Tesh for not letting us have everything even in the fix-it universe. And I just really liked how from the very beginning of the book the themes of practice and iteration and cheating are present, and how she evolved them.
It's marketed as adult but I wonder whether anyone might nominate it for the Lodestar - it's very much a coming-of-age book and I thought felt plausibly borderline in that "older YA - new adult" kind of way. I've kind of lost track of whether the current opinion is that certain kinds of content disqualify something for YA - like, there's a lot of stuff happening here with bodily autonomy and sexual autonomy, but if Chaos Walking counts as YA, this probably could too?
Spoilers At least, I thought the whole question of "what point do you go back to, what would you try to change" had some interesting resonance with the whole "reverse the Snap but preserve the timeline vs prevent the Snap and give up the timeline" question. As a piece of one-iteration timeloop fiction, of course Tesh has to come back and do the third act as a corrected first act - the fantasy of the do-over, the practice run! - but ouch, the Earth, wow! I admire Tesh for not letting us have everything even in the fix-it universe. And I just really liked how from the very beginning of the book the themes of practice and iteration and cheating are present, and how she evolved them.
It's marketed as adult but I wonder whether anyone might nominate it for the Lodestar - it's very much a coming-of-age book and I thought felt plausibly borderline in that "older YA - new adult" kind of way. I've kind of lost track of whether the current opinion is that certain kinds of content disqualify something for YA - like, there's a lot of stuff happening here with bodily autonomy and sexual autonomy, but if Chaos Walking counts as YA, this probably could too?
