I actually really liked this, and I’m really surprised about it. This book deserves a longer, more thorough review, but I’m just not capable of doing that at the moment. I can see how this book wouldn’t work for some people, but if it doesn’t, it seems a matter of taste to me. I feel like Emily Tesh knew exactly what she wanted to do with the story, and pulled it off. The concepts, characters, plot twists, and everything else this book was wanting to explore I thought it explored really well, and did so with nuance and care*, for the most part.
*The one moment in here that absolutely should have been removed was the scene at the end with a certain two characters touching each other’s hair/hair-equivalent, as like a gesture of solidarity? It was genuinely one of the cringiest things I’ve ever read.
Not gonna do a summary here, not enough mental energy, you can read the blurb. I’ll wait.
Light spoilers here: I’ve seen some pushback to the idea that Kyr would have been deprogrammed so quickly and easily, but I think what happened here was right. Kyr was never going to change, unless world-altering circumstances made her. First they force her to question everything, which she never would have done on her own, and then her brainwashing is broken by essentially SPOILERS giving her new perspective via timey-wimey stuff that literally gives her new memories END SPOILERS. I don’t think anything less than this would have been able to get Kyr out of her own head enough to reevaluate things, at least not in time to save her or anyone else. And that’s a damning enough message in itself!
This book wanted to explore an unthinking adherent to a fascist death cult, what that person’s life would look like to others, and what it would take to shake them out of it. The story had me the whole time, even when I didn’t like anybody. It was an interesting way in to the narrative, where you have to literally read between the lines at what is not being said, or what Kyr is not noticing or understanding in order to get a more full picture.
The last half of the book gets pretty wild in terms of sci-fi concepts, and I blew through it, not expecting a book with such grim subject matter to give me those “fun” feelings. I will definitely read from Emily Tesh again.
