I just finished this book, and I'm reeling.
This book is built on the notion that the rest of the universe sees humans as, basically, orcs. Humans are bigger, stronger, faster, and tougher than all other sentient species, and among the most warlike. When humanity made its way to the stars, of course war broke out between us and the Majo, an interspecies Federation governed by an AI called "the Wisdom" with immense reality-bending powers. The Wisdom decided the best course of action was to destroy Earth entirely.
Jump forward almost twenty years, and we get to our story. Valkyr is a cadet on Gaea Station, a rock with a few of humanity's surviving dreadnoughts strapped to it & cannibalized to provide support to a few thousand surviving humans.
"While we live, the enemy shall fear us" are the words they live by. Valkyr has spent her life training ferociously, determined to dedicate her life to humanity's never-ending war for vengeance. The book begins as she is finishing her cadet years and awaiting her assignment … which is to the so-called Nursery Wing. Her skills as a soldier are not nearly as important, in Gaea Station Command's judgment, as her capacity to bear the next generation of humanity.
For the first part of this book, I really *disliked* Valkyr. The universe, the Majo, the Wisdom, Gaea Station, and the long-ended-yet-never-ending war are all more complicated than she was raised to believe. And she is so heavily propagandized that not only does she take everything she was taught as truth, she is violently (literally) against having those "truths" challenged. Being in the head of someone who believes so many obvious lies is a frustrating experience, to say the least.
But luckily being frustrated by her doesn't mean I didn't empathize with her, and her eyes do gradually open. As the book goes on she confronts the truth of the war, her childhood, her prejudices, and above all herself. Which is the beginning of the story rather than the end.
This is a masterpiece of a space opera. It’s tense, it’s relentless, it tears your heart to pieces and stitches it back together so it can tear it apart again.
Content warning for this book: graphic depiction of suicide.
Comes out on April 11.