All her life, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the destruction of planet Earth. Raised on Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet.
But when Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates Kyr to the nursery to bear sons, 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 must escape from everything she’s ever known. If she succeeds, she will find a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could ever have imagined.
Kyr is a dedicated and loyal soldier on Gaea Station, pushing herself and her team hard, so that one day they can help avenge the destroyed Earth. But then she meets a captured alien, leaves Gaea Station, and experiences the strangeness of the larger universe. And then something totally unexpected happens.
This is a great space opera, as Kyr, not a very pleasant protagonist at all, keeps getting her world-view changed. And the plot keeps making right-angled turns just when you think you know where it might be going. It’s a great page-turner.
It’s a fascinating tale of fanaticism, second chances, growing up, what decisions to make, who has the right to make them, and whether choosing some appalling action is justified if you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that making any other choice would result in even worse outcomes.
Recommended.
Walden is good at her job &ndash no, Walden is great at her job. But demons are masters of manipulation. It’s her responsibility to keep her school with its six hundred students and centuries-old legacy safe. But it’s possible the entity Walden most needs to keep her school safe from…is herself.
Doctor Saffy Walden is a hard working teacher and a powerful magician. She teaches invocation at A-level, chairs various school committees, and is responsible for the magical safety of everyone. She is respected by her students, and everything seems under control. Then a gifted sixth-former invokes something too big to handle, and everything begins to unravel.
Tesh’s last work includes a Sparta-like training school in a science-fictional future (which I didn’t realise while reading it, only later when hearing her talk at an SF convention, but it’s clear when you know that). This one is set in a contemporary UK, where everything is the same as here, except for the acknowledged existence of magic. Studying it is even an Oxford degree! It is a traditional magical boarding school fantasy made very different by being from the PoV of a senior teacher, not a magical pupil. Tesh herself is a school teacher, which adds realism to the novels.
Walden is an engaging protagonist, adult enough and self-aware enough to realise some of her limitations, but not all of them, as she comes to realise. The demonic fantasy world-building is nicely done, and is integrated into the overall plot. The way Walden’s back-story is drip fed into the narrative keeps us guessing, and the plot twists off in interesting ways.
So, Tesh can do science fictional schools and fantasy schools equally well. I look forward to seeing what she gets up to next.