VICTORIES GREATER THAN DEATH

Tina’s Arena

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Paperback/ebook

Author Charlie Jane Anders

Publisher Titan Books

There’s an admirable crispness to the prose in Charlie Jane Anders’s first YA book. No messing: within a few paragraphs, we learn that teenage protagonist Tina is an alien awaiting pick-up from Earth. This will occur when her internal beacon lights up – which it duly does.

Soon, Tina, the tweaked-tomake-her-look-more-human clone of near-legendary alien commander Captain Thaoh Argentian, is zipping around the universe aboard a Royal Fleet starship, one of the good guys – for all that the book plays with the idea that people trying to do good can make bad calls.

She’s accompanied by best friend Rachael and a quartet of nerds, transported onboard after proving their superior intelligence. All bring different degrees of emotional baggage. All six have to deal with the idea that they’ve left home forever as they come of age. But Ender’s Game this is not.

For a start, as Tina and co try to chase down an artefact called the Talgan stone, which misleadingly named über-baddies The Compassion are also hunting for, this is a book that delights in forward motion almost above all else – moving to the next scene with the zip of a Star Wars movie. It’s also a book that celebrates uncool-kid outsiders and wears its queernorm heart on its sleeve. Among alien cultures, it’s polite to introduce yourself by giving your name followed by your preferred pronoun. This is not something that happens in the prose of Orson Scott Card.

Such is the way the book makes merry with space opera conventions that it’s been compared to Hitchhiker’s, but a better comparison may be the way China Miéville knowingly poked a stick at urban fantasy in his YA novel Un Lun Dun. For an adult reader, that means Victories often comes across as too arch, perhaps even too pedagogic. But it’s big-hearted and huge fun for all that. Jonathan Wright

According to Anders, in the days before she made a living as a writer her worst job was as a “monkey-frightener”.