Charlie Jane Anders’ Victories Greater Than Death

YA space opera that is thoroughly modern and crackling with adventure.

“Victories Greater Than Death” is Charlie Jane Anders’ debut YA novel, and it’s superb — an exciting, engrossing book that captures everything great about young adult tropes while deftly subverting the problems those tropes present.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250317308/victoriesgreaterthandeath

Tina Mains is not actually a human girl. As her mother has told her, she is the reincarnated clone of a great space adventurer, whose space-navy comrades disguised her as a human girl and hid her on Earth from their evil adversaries.

Now, Tina is in high-school and she senses the coming of day when her beacon will activate, signalling her maturity and summoning her alien comrades to take her to adventure. She knows that when the beacon activates, she will be immediately beset by the evil foes who murdered her forbear, and has mentally rehearsed her escape plan many times. Nevertheless, when the fateful night arrives, her friends are swept up in the peril, and she ends up on the space-navy ship in the company of Rachael, her best friend of all.

Right away, the story starts to depart from its expected trajectory. Yes, Tina is The Chosen One, but…