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A review by brisingr
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
5.0
oh, THIS is a special little (not really little) gem of a book!!! (hidden behind that hideously generic cover wtf!!!) we knew it will grab me by my throat and make me go a tiny bit insane when it was blurbed by Tamsyn Muir, when everyone said this is the best novel to read if you love The Locked Tomb.... and i AM the drama because i don't know if i agree. Zero similarities, beyond being just odes to what being a human is.
Yes, in stories so filled with science, pseudomagic and aliens, this book is at the core, about what it means to be human: how easily gullible we can be for a slight sense of glory, how vicious and hateful and biting, how hopeful even in front of devastation, how vengeful and horrible. What being human brings: so much death, so little hope - but how much that hope matters. It made me feel so, so many things about what it means to live in any kind of world: what do you believe in? Why? What emotions rule your everyday? Are you willing to change anything? Why and why not? Where are your limits and have you explored them lately?
And maybe more importantly, it illustrates so well how systems are made up of people, and all their many flaws and dreams and rage. It's a lesson in learning new things and unlearning old ones, and in how community cannot exist without every individual, and how every individual can undo a world.
Who needs philosophy when you have science fiction? Because you have all that: the search for a purpose, and its answer - but then you also have video games and a planet where it always rains and a God-like construct and OF COURSE aliens and a vicious little thing as our protagonist who, despite all warnings on every single corner of the internet (read this for unlikeable protagonists!!!) I just adored.
I've always said that the most important thing in a book for me is for it to be satisfying. I need the story to make sense, I need the characters - even when I actively hate every action and every choices of theirs, to have an explanation that aligns with their world and their thoughts, and I need to see this story pattern and sigh in relief because of course things can go no other way, this the one that leaves me feeling at the end as if I just swallowed the sun. This was a perfect book, indeed, and what a treasure to have gotten to read it.
Emily Tesh, author of my heart now <3
Yes, in stories so filled with science, pseudomagic and aliens, this book is at the core, about what it means to be human: how easily gullible we can be for a slight sense of glory, how vicious and hateful and biting, how hopeful even in front of devastation, how vengeful and horrible. What being human brings: so much death, so little hope - but how much that hope matters. It made me feel so, so many things about what it means to live in any kind of world: what do you believe in? Why? What emotions rule your everyday? Are you willing to change anything? Why and why not? Where are your limits and have you explored them lately?
And maybe more importantly, it illustrates so well how systems are made up of people, and all their many flaws and dreams and rage. It's a lesson in learning new things and unlearning old ones, and in how community cannot exist without every individual, and how every individual can undo a world.
Who needs philosophy when you have science fiction? Because you have all that: the search for a purpose, and its answer - but then you also have video games and a planet where it always rains and a God-like construct and OF COURSE aliens and a vicious little thing as our protagonist who, despite all warnings on every single corner of the internet (read this for unlikeable protagonists!!!) I just adored.
I've always said that the most important thing in a book for me is for it to be satisfying. I need the story to make sense, I need the characters - even when I actively hate every action and every choices of theirs, to have an explanation that aligns with their world and their thoughts, and I need to see this story pattern and sigh in relief because of course things can go no other way, this the one that leaves me feeling at the end as if I just swallowed the sun. This was a perfect book, indeed, and what a treasure to have gotten to read it.
Emily Tesh, author of my heart now <3