Disclaimer: I received this e-arc from the publisher. Thanks! All opinions are my own.

Book: Victories Greater Than Death

Author: Charlie Jane Anders

Book Series: Unstoppable Book 1

Diversity: Pronoun usage, Non binary side character, Plus Size side character, Indian side character, Asian side character, Brazilian transgender side character, Black gay side character, Anxiety rep side character, F/f romance

Rating: 1/5

Recommended For...: young adult readers, science fiction

Genre: YA Sci-fi

Publication Date: April 13, 2021

Publisher: Tor Teen

Pages: 288

Recommended Age: 14+ (Child abuse mention TW, Death, Slight sexual content, Gore, Violence)

Explanation of CWs: 1 mention of child abuse in the past. There is lots of violence and death and gore in this book. There is also one scene that's suggestive of sex.

Synopsis: 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.

Review: So while I managed to get through this whole book (and it was a struggle) I hated every moment reading this book past 15%. The book really felt bland and tropey, and when I say tropey I mean the book tries to use a ton of the usual tropes of YA sci-fi but fails to write them and tell them well. The book wasn't anything very unique and there was just so much clutter in the book to go through in order to understand who was who for the aliens and what was going on. The author didn't let the side characters really develop or grow and while I loved that they all were very diverse, the author didn't write their identities into how they interacted with their environment. In fact, all of the characters felt super 1 dimensional and flat. There was too much telling and virtually no showing. The world building was awful. And the book, overall, was just awful and there's better books out there that utilize the same tropes, but they actually work.

Verdict: Not for me but maybe for you!

Outsmart Your Enemies. Outrun the Galaxy.

“Just please, remember what I told you. Run. Don’t stop running for anything.”

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--and everyone in the galaxy is expecting her to actually be the brilliant tactician and legendary savior Captain Thaoh Argentian, but Tina....is just Tina. And the Royal Fleet is losing the war, badly--the starship that found her is on the run and they barely manage to escape Earth with the planet still intact.

Luckily, Tina is surrounded by a crew she can trust, and her best friend Rachel, 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 YA sci-fi adventure set against an intergalactic war from internationally bestselling author Charlie Jane Anders

Victories Greater Than Death is my first book by Charlie Jane Anders, and I believe it’s her first Young Adult book. In theory this book was a total win for me: It’s a sci-fi set in space with all these different alien beings. The main character is an alien clone of one of them, who’d been hiding as a human on Earth before being brought back to space to aid in a galactic war. I think it was well-written and creative, but there was something about it that didn’t always hold my attention. And I can’t pinpoint exactly what it was. I think a lot of the characters could have been fleshed out more. I found myself having trouble keeping straight who was who at times. I liked the use of pronouns as a natural part of introducing yourself and the respect that everyone had for others. I appreciated the journey the main character Tina went on as she learned more about herself, what she wants to do and who she wants to be. I didn’t necessarily buy the romance, because the chemistry wasn’t really there… but that could be because the characters outside the MC weren’t as developed as much, so I didn’t understand what drew Tina to them. Anyways, I think there is a definite audience for this book and people who will love it of course. Don’t let the fact that I didn’t vibe with it steer you away from reading it if it sounds interesting to you.

I wanted to like this WAY more than I did. The separate elements were all good: the individual characters, especially the quirky Earthlings, the clone conundrum that was Tina vs Capt Argentian, the archeological mystery to solve (my favorite part), but the combo just didn't work for me as well as it could have. I can't put my finger on what exactly stopped it from working for me, but it's hard not to compare it to other YA space operas like the Aurora Cycle series. The romance was a little angsty for me and had some weird timing (declation of love right before a battle) and while I really liked the diversity, I questioned the pronoun use in the alien languages. There was a weird transition between chapters where I thought I'd missed something and had to go back and reread. I had to suspend my disbelief after these new kids were given such high status on a spaceship where they know nothing, but one was trained on flying the spaceship, one with the computers, one in medical,etc. I know they're supposed to be smart, but the ppl onboard must have been so pissed! I almost think seeing things from Rachel's POV might have even been better. Though I love Ms Anders' adult books, this is not a book I would necessarily recommend.

When I heard Charlie Jane Anders was diving into YA I whooped with glee! She’s one of my all time favorite authors and her SciFi books are beautiful and eye opening. Victories Greater than Death was no different: the characters are so vivid and there are some absolutely incredible SciFi concepts woven in these pages. It definitely feels YA, but it twists the usual tropes on their heads. The character growth is exquisite. My review seems so discombobulated but really it’s that there’s so much to love I don’t know how to organize my thoughts.

I got an ARC of this book.

I am going to be honest, I didn't finish this book. I stopped at around 70%. I just couldn't do it any more. I loved parts of this book (hence the three stars), but it just DRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGED for me. There was so much going for it, but then the pacing and timing felt off the whole time.

Loved:
queer norm world
different species not being all perfectly humanoid
The Shapers, I hated them, but I loved the idea of them and wished more sci-fi stuff acknowledged things like this would very much happen.

Disliked:
the pacing
the amount of heavy sci-fi explanations that just don't seem to fit in with the rest of the story and add to the pacing issue

This book starts out intriguing but somewhat slow. There is a lot of background information to catch up with before the plot can really get started and the way the information is presented confused me as it sometimes felt like I was reading the second book in a series, not the first. However, once the plot starts up, it moves quickly and I was easily pulled along.

Tina was a fun protagonist to follow along with because of her status as a clone. She’s starting to learn more about “herself” or her past life just as the reader is learning about her as well. There is a wide variety of supporting cast as well. While it seems at times that there were too many people to keep up with, the majority of the time, I enjoyed the diverse cast.

It was extremely entertaining to explore the world and “science” in this novel. I’ve always loved space and the idea of space travel so it was exciting to see this author’s take on alien life. There wasn’t anything too detailed that I got confused or felt like I had to know more about physics or other sciences. Much like this plot, it was just good fun.

Victories Great Than Death is an enjoyable and fun read. It may be a bit too simplistic for some readers, but I felt engaged by the plot and would recommend it to others who love space and science fiction. There are a lot of characters to keep up with, but the plot keeps the pacing moving quick enough that I never felt too bogged down by the large cast.

Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders is a YA sci-fi adventure story. It's Tina's story, who has some sleeping beacon in her that is going to go off, and then she's expected to be able to fight all the bad guys with one hand tied behind her back.

Tina's destiny is to be a hero since she's a clone of a badass alien hero, but she's also a teenage girl. She has some of the memories from her clone but she's also a teenage girl and navigating how to be the chosen one. She needs her friends to ground her and help her make sense of the world. If you made the comparison to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, congrats, you're old like me. But it's a storytelling formula that works really well. It's Tina's friendship with Rachel, her best friend from Earth, that really makes the book work. They are navigating relationships and figuring out how to be friends even as there's an intergalactic war going on.

Victories Greater Than Death moves a bit slowly for a YA but is still a great read. Fans of Firefly, Battle Star Galactica, and Star Trek Discovery should definitely check this out.

I was so excited to read Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders. Unapologetically queer scifi is right up my alley, but my relationship with this book ended up being a complicated one. I loved the normalization of sharing your pronouns when introducing yourself. I loved the diverse crew of teenage cinnamon rolls! The pacing was weird for me though. There were times when I was very excited to see what came next and others where I felt bored. The villain in this story felt pretty bland to me. This book read as somewhere between MG and YA to me. Overall, I love that this book exists, it just wasn't my favorite. I'd recommend it if you're looking for a lighter queer scifi!

3.5/5 Stars

Victories Greater Than Death is about Tina, a girl after my own heart who just can't wait to get out there in the world. Except she's an alien. The world that Anders creates is brilliant; I think it would make a beautiful graphic novel.. It is also commendable that this book has such a diverse cast of characters, albeit there were so many that it was at times difficult to follow. The book was very Stars Wars/Star Trek - y, and I think it would make a great show or graphic novel, but it often felt too long.

Overall, this is a book for teens. I think teens will really enjoy and identify with the struggles that Tina feels about meeting expectations but also wanting to make your own dreams come true.

Released April 13, 2021

Victories Greater Than Death
By. Charlie Jane Anders
Tor Teen
P. 288
Format: eArc
Rating: ****
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I received an e-arc from @Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
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Victories Greater Than Death is Anders’ first young adult novel. The book starts right in the action with Tina trying to activate her alien homing beacon so that she can be taken back to outer space, where she was expected to save the galaxy. It seems like something all teenagers fantasize about - or was that just me - but in Tina’s case it is real. She also brings along some friends. What we get is a space voyage featuring a handful of Earth’s youngest and brightest.

My favorite aspect of the book is it’s diversity. Anders included multiple cultures, genders, and sexual orientations. The universal translator is crafted to announce a person’s pronouns when they are first introduced. I love this and while this is done I think this should just become a cultural norm. Since our characters are teenagers they are dealing with a lot of teenager identity crisis that all happen in the middle of a galactic war.

While I really enjoyed the book it took me a lot longer to read then a 288 page book normally would have. I felt more distant from the characters then I would have liked and kept putting the book down. While the core human group was easily identifiable, it did not feel the same with the aliens. I kept having to stop and remind me who certain people were.

I love Anders writing. While this is not my favorite book of hers, I still enjoyed it and plan on continuing on with the series.

Anders is writing sci Fi unlike anyone else these days. This book in particular was bizarre, unique, fun, And captivating. Not the widest of appeal but her fans will be excited about this one.

This was my first book by Charlie Jane Anders and it did not disappoint! I love a good space opera so I knew this was going to be right up my alley. I loved the unique characters, aliens, humanoids, and the interesting worldbuilding. I did feel the book was a bit hard to follow at times. It seemed to jump around abruptly. The author says that it's a tribute to Dr. Who, Star Wars, Star Trek. I've only followed Star Wars so some of this may have been lost on me. Overall I enjoyed it.

I really enjoyed this book! The diversity was something I really enjoyed as it was natural and not forced. The fast paced action was really gratifying and the while world that was built was really interesting.

I liked this book which is about a teenager named Tina who is a human clone of an alien commander. She is being chased by her enemies and finds herself caught with her crew she didn't know about. Now she and her friends must save the world. I enjoyed the plot and story of this book. There was a lot of action in this book which made the story more enjoyable. I felt that the pacing was a little off but it wasn't that bad. I enjoyed how the author lets the readers know about a character's pronouns because most authors don't introduce us to a character like that which often leaves them confused or not noticeable.

With the characters, I didn't really enjoy them. The main character is Tina and the book is written from her POV. Often I felt that this character was too childish at times and kind of annoying. I didn't see much character development from her but mostly from the side characters. I enjoyed the side characters of the story but I felt that there were way too many involved in the story which made it a little hard to keep up with. Also, Tina's best friend did the most work in this book as in taking the risk wise. There was some romance in this book between these two couple which felt a little too forced and not a real slow burn.

The ending with the book was a little oof and with a cliffhanger that wasn't the best cliffhanger. It was one of those where you don't really mind waiting for the next book to come out. For this book, I felt that the writing was better than the characters written in the book. It's kind of hard to explain but I hope you can understand what I mean. This book wasn't so bad and I'm probably going to check out the next book just to see if I change my mind about the characters. I recommend this book to fans of Illuminae and Star Wars.

In the end, I regret this book wasn't for me. I enjoyed parts of it due to its fun dialogue and likable characters, and do think it will find its teen audience perfectly, but I didn't find myself connecting to the story as I'd hoped. That said, I also appreciated the way two of the characters, especially near the beginning, recognize each others' boundaries and the need for physical consent even when it comes to something as small as a hug between friends.

I was really excited to read Victories Greater than Death because Anders' All the Birds in the Sky was one of my top five favourite books last year! If you are always looking for diverse representation in space, this is unquestionably the book for you!

I enjoyed reading VGTD, but I also struggled to connect with it as I frequently do with sci-fi, but it seems like many people really DID connect with it. If you look at the reviews on Goodreads, they tend to be extremely split between people who loved it (five stars) and people who didn't connect with it, with very few reactions in between. So I think the key is figuring out which of those two camps you would fall into. Hopefully, this review is helpful to prospective readers!

I first want to say that as far as sci-fi goes, this is very accessible because everything is explained to the reader. This is opposed to a lot of SciFi where you are dropped into the world, and you just need to figure it out on your own. But I think explaining everything to the reader can get overwhelming in its own way? I found myself getting lost or confused a lot. More than in any other sci-fi or fantasy book I've read this year.

For example, the cultural details about different alien races were incredibly cool. Anders really imagines complex possibilities for these other societies instead of just using the "slightly weird humanoids" trope we are so used to seeing. But at times, this became overwhelming for me. I don't know if it's just the type of brain I have (great with big picture metaphorical thinking, but not great with a lot of little facts and names), but I had a hard time sorting through what of all this detailed description was essential to the plot, and what was just offhand world-building. I've had this problem before. It's like my brain can't hold all the details, so if I can't tell what is necessary, it will sift things out that end up being essential but keep things that aren't.

Separate from that, there were a few minor issues I had. I found the protagonist's relationship with her mom to be weird. She leaves her mom potentially forever and never thinks about her again, even when she is about to die. They are depicted as having a positive relationship that is just indifferent. Parental relationships tend to hold a LOT of weight, good or bad. So I just found that weird. The ending, while ripe for a sequel, also felt abrupt to me.

This is a found family story with a huge, diverse cast of characters in space. So if that is your jam, you are going to love this. But for me, there were simply too many characters and too many facts that didn't end up being important to the story. Because of both these issues, the book was also way too long for the story it was trying to tell. I think what I loved about All the Birds in the Sky is you got this very in-depth look at two very flawed characters that I fell in love with. Here we have much more breadth than depth with the huge cast. I got to know every character a tiny bit, but that means I didn't fall in love, or even like, with any of them.

The whole time I was reading this book, I was thinking "Ah, so this is what Ernest Cline's Armada would be if he cared about female characters. Or worldbuilding. Or all the fictional possibilities for alien races and cultures. Or playing with language, or invented traditions. Or character growth rather than character vindication. Or any time and place but the 1980s in America." I mean, there's a teenager who ends up in space, alongside a group of precocious peers, fighting a horrific alien menace, and being astonishingly good at it, and there's a romantic subplot, so in a sense it's pretty similar. It's just that instead of saying "Yeah, I recognize that reference, yeah, I saw that movie or played that game too" throughout and then rolling my eyes every time the protagonist got another big gaudy back-pat for being Awesomz!!1! I was actually immersed in all the neat and surprising details of this universe and its cultures and creations. The genocidal supremacist-fascist faction that calls itself "The Compassion" and claims it's just doing what's best for everyone hit particularly close to home, in terms of capturing how modern politics works, but mostly, I just dug all the cool and surprising aliens.

I don’t know what it is, I’ve tried very hard to get into to sci- fi, but it’s just not my genre. I think this was an ok read and I can understand the appeal, but I love being immersed in more fantasy settings. I think this book would be really good for a sci-fi lover

DNF @ 59%
A fast-paced YA scifi novel with a varied cast and a failed reincarnation storyline.

Content warnings include: bullying, violence, death, eugenics, racism, transphobia.

This was a fine and fast read, though it was almost too fast to really make me feel deeply engaged, and right now failed to keep my attention.
I liked all the different characters, though I'm not entirely sure I got the hang of their personalities almost two-thirds in.
The story was interesting, but ultimately I think the tone of the story wasn't what I was feeling like at the time when I read it. Might give it another shot another time!