Victories Greater Than Death is the first YA book in an sf trilogy. It follows Earth teenager Tina Mains, who knows growing up that she is the clone of a dead alien space hero. She gets sucked into space adventures, trying to fill the shoes of the hero everybody expects her to be (but isn't), while still trying to save everybody. I don't read a lot of YA fare, but it ticked my expectation buckets of overflowing feelings, romance/relationships, family and life trauma, struggling with expectations (in various dimensions), etc etc. It was also just a fun romp overall.

Some specific callouts: * I liked that Tina's mom knew that Tina was the clone of some hero and would leave some day, and was both sad and supportive about this; a fun change from the normal "coming out" secret identity riff * the villain has the power to touch somebody and melt them, but when he does so that person's memory is tarnished in everybody's minds; afterwards, the dead person's friends all think "ah that person got killed, but they deserved it, I hated them, they're garbage" and honestly what a horrible villain superpower * all of the space folks introduce themselves with their pronoun even when taking people prisoner; this is 10000% corny and stilted, but by the end I kind of loved it * lots of queer / poly / etc stuff, unsurprising when coming from Charlie Jane Anders, but you still love to see it

One theme running through a lot of the first book is the question of violence. To try to sum it up a little, Tina joins up with the Royal Fleet who is currently in an ongoing war with the Compassion. There's a number of characters who joined the Royal Fleet to get away from violence, but then got sucked into it anyway. Tina herself has to work through what feels like some trauma after she kills some people using her borrowed hero skills. The book the ends with some resolution that violence should be avoided as much as possible. It's not clear to me if this is a larger theme for the series or a personal piece for Tina and her own trauma. (Other characters expressing similar views make me lean towards the former.)

I'll be interested to see where the rest of the books go and what they have to say on this front. It could also be a question of not just the wrong tool, but also in support of the wrong thing. For instance, it's certainly clear that the Compassion are genocidal fascists, but the Royal Fleet kind of feels like space cops (or maybe the national guard of an empire) who maybe should be helping people directly and in more material ways but never really get around to it and spend all of their time fighting others and making sure the locals don't amass any power themselves.

I mostly think it's an interesting thing to read so soon after reading Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence recently which had a much different titular view that power will never listen to polite requests and that violence is the only language that it recognizes. (Even as power hypocritically enacts its own forms of "nice" violence, in economic and racist and far-away-airquotes-justified-war ways.)