VICTORIES GREATER THAN DEATH, well-deserved 2022 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Novel

VICTORIES GREATER THAN DEATH
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
Tor Teen
$18.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Tina never worries about being ‘ordinary’—she doesn’t have to, since she’s known practically forever that she’s not just Tina Mains, average teenager and beloved daughter. She’s also the keeper of an interplanetary rescue beacon, and one day soon, it’s going to activate, and then her dreams of saving all the worlds and adventuring among the stars will finally be possible. Tina’s legacy, after all, is intergalactic—she is the hidden clone of a famed alien hero, left on Earth disguised as a human to give the universe another chance to defeat a terrible evil.

But when the beacon activates, it turns out that Tina’s destiny isn’t quite what she expected. Things are far more dangerous than she ever assumed. Luckily, Tina is surrounded by a crew she can trust, and her best friend Rachael, and she is still determined to save all the worlds. But first she’ll have to save herself.

Buckle up your seatbelt for this thrilling sci-fi adventure set against an intergalactic war from international bestselling author Charlie Jane Anders.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE AUTHOR. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is, hands down, the queerest YA book I've read.

I really could stop writing now with the injunction for you to go get a copy and read it before setting it loose into the library, the Little Free Library, the bus subway breakroom etc etc. Tina and her found families are urgently needed in a world where the ugliest, most hateful and judgmental people are launching their latest attack on progress, inclusion, and a better world.

Same as it ever was.

What the younger readers will learn from reading Aunt Charlie Jane's book is that there is a future, and it can look the way you'd like it to look...but you have to be willing to move outside your boundaries, you have to embrace your ability to make, find, and accept the world's wildness and surprises. Your efforts will pay off in proportion to your commitment to them.

How Author Charlie Jane accomplishes that is to take one teen girl, one best friend of teen girl, and hurl them into a cosmic battle of good against evil. Do you know a teenager...have you EVER known a teenager...who did not resonate like a struck bell to this plot? And then Author Charlie Jane shakes the soda bottle to fizz up the stakes by making everyone in the girls' expanded universe into some form of different, but without Othering them for the differences...after all, if the way you just are is somehow different from how I am, who says *I* get to decide that YOU are the Other?

This is a truth that permeates all Author Charlie Jane's work. It makes the banners and haters and deniers completely mental. Since I think making those sorts of people wildly uncomfortable is a very worthy cause, I want to support it wherever I can.

While I love a dense, richly textured world, I'm an old man and have been reading since before Author Charlie Jane was born, so I found the expository bits too frequent and a smidge too detailed for my reading pleasure to morph into joy. They seem a touch overdone for today's SF-savvy youth, if I'm honest; but that is a thing I'm happy to see because it means this book can be an onramp into SF for even the most innocent and unworldly young person.

Matching my expectations, then, was not her project...that was what she did with Even Greater Mistakes, her other work from the annus mirabilis that was her 2022...but speaking to her audience, to the future leaders and readers. This is a wonderful thing, an excellent project, and a top-quality execution of it.

Gift it. Read it yourself, then give it to all the young readers you know.