Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Published 2023 · 142,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · science fiction, space opera, military science fiction, LGBTQ+ science fiction
How hard is Some Desperate Glory to read?
Some Desperate Glory scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- Tesh writes plain, propulsive prose stripped of archaism, but the exposition leans on invented military and alien terms — Wisdom, majo, Wardens, Nursery — that carry ideological weight beyond their literal definitions and take a chapter or two to absorb. It sits closer to Beach Read's accessibility than to anything near Moby-Dick's specialized vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 34 out of 100
- Sentences are short, declarative, and built for momentum, matching Kyr's clipped military training rather than any interest in subordination or nested clauses. It belongs with 1984's directness rather than the Jamesian end of the scale.
- Abstraction: 54 out of 100
- The novel stages real arguments about fascism, complicity, and genocide, but always through Kyr's concrete choices rather than essayistic digression — closer to The Great Gatsby's social observation through story than to a discursive philosophical mode.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Multiple timeline resets force readers to track shifting political history, competing versions of events, and a widening cast across star systems, giving it more to hold in mind than a single-timeline war novel, though nothing like the encyclopedic density of War and Peace.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Kyr narrates her own indoctrination with total sincerity, so readers spend the opening section recognizing propaganda she can't yet see — a structure closer to Nick Carraway's unreliable devotion in The Great Gatsby than to a straightforwardly trustworthy narrator.
- Symbolic density: 38 out of 100
- The novel favors direct political argument over layered symbol systems — Gaea Station and its rituals of mourning function as world-building more than metaphor, putting it closer to 1984's legible allegory than to a text built on symbol like To the Lighthouse.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- The title quotes Wilfred Owen's line about 'the old lie' that it is sweet to die for one's country, and the whole book is built to dismantle the glory Kyr has been raised to want — a sustained gap between what Kyr believes and what the text argues, in the register of The Great Gatsby's sympathy-and-critique rather than outright satire.
- Resolution withholding: 38 out of 100
- The repeating-timeline structure holds off a single ending for most of the book, but Tesh ultimately commits to a clear resolution and moral stance rather than leaving Kyr's fate open, closer to Beloved's earned closure than to 2666's refusal to resolve.
- Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
- The book resets its own timeline multiple times, replaying Kyr's story with different choices and consequences in the mode of Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, which pushes its structural complexity well above a standard linear war narrative even though each individual loop reads cleanly.
How Some Desperate Glory is regarded
Some Desperate Glory holds a literary regard score of 48 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.