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. When Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to 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, Kyr escapes from everything she’s known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined.
2023 is shaping up to be a great year, at least in terms of books I’m reading! I’ve already reviewed two books that will 100% make their way onto my Best Reads of 2023 list (THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF HOODIE ROSEN and DON’T FEAR THE REAPER), and goddamn…I’ll go ahead and add Emily Tesh’s SOME DESPERATE GLORY to the list as well, because this book fucking ruined me!!! Gah!! What an absolute gem this book is!
Maybe I’ve got an affinity for “unlikable” characters or something, I don’t know…looking around at some reviews for SOME DESPERATE GLORY, and so many talk about how, at least in the early going of the book, the main character Kyr is completely unlikable. That people just want to scream at her.
And I mean, fair. As the book unfolds, it becomes clear that Kyr has spent the entirety of her young life training to be a brutal fascist. She’s part of the very last of humanity, born and raised on Gaea Station. An alien race, the majoda, have destroyed Earth some years before the book begins. Kyr and her twin brother Magnus are the brightest & the best soldiers that Gaea Station has to offer.
Still, when it comes time for Kyr to be permanently assigned to a division on Gaea, she’s sent to Nursery. She and Magnus are sort of the last genetic remnants of Earth’s super soldier program, and so yeah…Kyr is assigned to what is basically a human breeding program, which…fucking yuck.
Meanwhile, Magnus gets assigned to the deadly combat division that Kyr had been dreaming of, but he’s a lot more than just the mountainous killer he appears to be on the outside, and he mysteriously disappears from Gaea shortly after receiving his assignment.
Which leaves Kyr feeling completely untethered. Like maybe the twin brother she knows better than anyone…maybe she doesn’t really know him at all.
With help from an annoying friend of Magnus’s and a member of the alien race that Kyr has sworn to destroy, she sets off on an interplanetary adventure that shakes loose pretty much every belief or value she holds close to her.
Shit gets absolutely wild! And heartbreaking! And tense! And sweet! But weird!
There are some parts of the book that feel a little slippery, as far as timelines & alternate realities and the like…for the most part, the book feels very grounded, but there are more than a handful of moments that left me feeling almost dizzy.
Gah…there’s so much happening in this book. There’s some really fucked-up family dynamics, there’s a whole lot about breaking down emotional barriers, about finding yourself, accepting yourself. This book is raw, and honest, and queer, and brutally emotional. I laughed. I fucking seethed. This book had a chokehold on me from beginning to end, and I just couldn’t have loved it any more.
Kyr is one of my favorite protagonists of the last few years, for sure. She is unequivocally badass, but also kind of an emotional hot mess. Yeah, I don’t know…there was just something that drew me to this character right away.
SOME DESPERATE GLORY fucking destroyed me…I just loved every single thing about this book!
Massive thanks to TorDotCom Publishing for this one! It releases on April 11th!
Grimdark Dad 