There was no real improvement over the first instalment for me here.

This was around a 3 star for me till around the 50-60% mark then it just dropped off again. My main gripe with Enright is that they just cannot commit to any character traits that they establish their characters to have. I really though we were going somewhere interesting with Shan and that Enright was going to allow her to be a villainess (because she does some awful shit in this book) but with about 50 pages to go Enright pulls an uno reverso card on us and reminds us that no Shan is a morally good character. And the fact that all the people she’s wronged just accept her back, makes no sense and dissipates all the tension that I thought Enright was trying to establish.

One thing I’ve always said from the 1st book is that Samuel just has no right to exist. He is just there to grovel after the other 2 love interest’s and be a participant in the smutty scenes. As harsh as it seems I’ve never read such a useless shoehorned character in my life. He alone brings the star rating down.

There was also some weird female hating undertones to this book that I just couldn’t get over. I might have just been reading too much into this but most of the gory, torture scenes happened to women by men, with weirdly detailed justifications for the extreme violence. Just something that never quite left me.

Ultimately I have the same problem with lord of ruin as I had with mistress of lies. A book that wants its characters to be morally grey and edgy but Enright spins the narrative in a way where it’s so obvious that they don’t want you to hate their main characters (so we have to deal with the existence of Samuel who sits there and justifies/forgives/glazes all the bad shit they do). I just think Enright cant quite commit to the darkness of the world they have created and it just leads to a disjointed experience.

Listened via Audio.

This was a real hidden gem for me. Wow what an underrated book I’ve not heard many people talking about. Space opera, time loops, unlikeable main character, dystopian setting, alien sidekicks. Yes yes yes.

Tesh knows how to write some characters that’s for sure. Kyr is incredibly unlikeable at the beginning of this story. Which you may think is a bad thing. However I have been on the hunt for stories with complex, nuanced, disagreeable characters that aren’t all squeaky clean and speak in 21st century morality language. I want my characters to have beliefs that fit the setting they are brought up in. And that is Kyr to a T, she is the biggest shill for the oppressive Gaian system going. Which made it all the more of a joy to watch her beliefs fall apart over the course of the book as she is exposed different peoples perspectives and encounter events that make her question everything that she knows. I loved Kyr at the end because I really believed Tesh made her work for your love.

This extends to the side characters too, they are not all beacons of morality and make very human and logical mistakes for the upbringing they have received. Avi in particular is absolutely nutty and I love the risks Tesh took with his character. Yiso is also a joy. In fact I think Tesh was very intentional with all he characters no matter how small of a role they played they all had a meaningful impact on the story (Ally, Cleo, Ursa, Lisabelle etc….).

Some desperate glory was also a surprisingly dark book beyond its surface. The war planet of Gaia is wholly dystopian in nature and due to Kyr’s blind support of the system, Tesh had to be particularly skilful at presenting these horrors as completely logical and normal in Kyr’s mind. And it honestly makes for a fascinating read, tense and almost doom inducing. Without spoiling much the way the ‘nursery’ aspects of Gaia station works is subtlety horrifying.

There’s a bit of time loop shenanigans going on in this book which is always risky. This alongside the wisdom stuff is probably what stops this being a 5 for me. But for the most part it’s done cleaner than the majority of sci-fi books deal with space time stuff these days.

Ultimately Some Desperate Glory is a tense, reflexive novel about a young girl on her journey to find out what it means to have a purpose and who gets to decide that in an ever growing conflict between human and aliens. It is both dark and hopeful. And often had me questioning what choices I would have made if I had been a Kyr’s shoes. I don’t think I can do this book justice in a review but I recommend you read this - it’s an underrated one.