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Jun. 20th, 2025 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretSome Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
There has to be a word for the literary technique where you have a section of the book that doesn't work- it's boring, or unsatisfying, or implausible, or mis-paced- but its presence makes a later part of the book land harder. Part IV of Some Desperate Glory doesn't work for me- it asks you to suddenly find empathy for characters it hasn't invested time in developing, it rushes to the action scene and then works through the action scene in a way that is inconsistent with the rest of the book. But then you get back to the characters you care about in Part V and everything is amplified and hits so fucking hard, because of Part IV. It's an incredible ending and a really neat structural achievement.
There has to be a word for the literary technique where you have a section of the book that doesn't work- it's boring, or unsatisfying, or implausible, or mis-paced- but its presence makes a later part of the book land harder. Part IV of Some Desperate Glory doesn't work for me- it asks you to suddenly find empathy for characters it hasn't invested time in developing, it rushes to the action scene and then works through the action scene in a way that is inconsistent with the rest of the book. But then you get back to the characters you care about in Part V and everything is amplified and hits so fucking hard, because of Part IV. It's an incredible ending and a really neat structural achievement.
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Date: 2025-06-20 04:31 pm (UTC)Huh, I thought the whole point of Part IV was that you were supposed to be taken aback by and not particularly empathic towards those characters, even though (or even because) in a more straightforward book they'd be the characters one would expect to empathize more with. I actually thought that was great. I must admit I didn't pay a lot of attention to the action scene, though, so I wouldn't have noticed if it didn't work.
I really do think this is an incredible book.