Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!
Ten Low has been on my TBR for ages, but I just haven’t been able to find it anywhere, for some reason—not my library, not any bookstores I’ve been to around where I live…until, somehow, it turns out that the Barnes & Noble in my college town had it! Naturally, I got myself a copy, and it was worth the read—brutal and cinematic all at once.
Enjoy this week’s review!
Ten Low is stranded. After defecting from the war effort, she made a desperate escape to a planet where she thought no one could find her. But trouble has found her already, in the form of Gabriella Ortiz—an unseemly thirteen-year-old girl on the outside, but in reality, the next incarnation of the tyrannical General that Ten once served under. Neither of them want to face the realities of their involvement in the war, but they have no choice: outside forces want them both dead, and Ten and Gabi must endure a treacherous desert full of bloodthirsty Seekers and threats on all sides if they want to get out of this alive…
TW/CW: graphic violence, war themes, blood, gore, descriptions of corpses, torture, child soldiers
Like superhero fatigue, I feel like there’s a case to make among sci-fi fans for a very specific fatigue for desert planets. Star Wars and Dune set the blueprints, but ever since, they’ve been…everywhere. (Tatooine was good once, but…can somebody tell Disney that they could’ve just stopped at one or two desert planets?) Ten Low was one of the few books where I feel like there was an original spin on it—and a lot of aspects of this novel can be boiled down to the same things: seemingly plain plot elements that were twisted into something fascinating.
Back to the desert planet aspect…even though there are altogether too many of them and often without original components (or, again, just aspects that were lifted from Dune or Star Wars), but Ten Low really couldn’t have been set anywhere else. Nowhere else could the harshness of the obstacles facing Ten and Gabi could have been harsher, and nowhere else could their struggle have been more palpable. I didn’t go in knowing that Ten Low was something of a space Western, which made the desert feel all the more fitting for the genre. Holborn didn’t just fill the place with sand and leave it at that; the desert, along with its many inhabitants, felt like a real hurdle that the characters had to overcome and work around, and not just a place to signal science fiction. I can’t help it—I’m a sucker for when the setting is just as inhospitable as the hardships that the characters are experiencing. I just re-read The Left Hand of Darkness, you can’t fault me for that.
As with the oft-used desert planet, Ten Low has a common trope in space Westerns in particular—pairing a tough, hardened adult character with a child that they have to drag along. (Anybody heard of a little show called The Mandalorian? Pretty indie, I know.) I already like the trope as is, so I wouldn’t have a problem if there wasn’t necessarily the most original take on it, as long as the characters could each pull their emotional weight and make me feel invested in the story. But what do you do when said child is a thirteen-year-old embedded with the consciousness of a dead, fascist general? And you happen to have been a medic that defected from said general’s army after witnessing the litany of crimes committed under her tyrannical reign? I loved how complicated that relationship got—not just because there’s nothing more unsettling than a thirteen-year-old girl who’s quite literally a warmonger with a list of crimes that could circle the planet twice, but because of how their relationship developed. Through their trek through the desert, there’s no “forgive and forget” resolution—and I’m glad Holborn strayed away from that, given what the General did to Ten and everybody else—but the commonality that neither of them wanted to be in their situations made their relationship so much stronger, and also that both of them were subject to horrors beyond their control.
Ten Low moves fast, and had it not been for Holborn’s cinematic writing style, I would have probably gotten lost somewhere along the way. But Holborn’s writing thoroughly kept me grounded, and it enhanced my reading experience immensely. Like any Western, there’s a rapidly rotating cast of characters and all manner of foes along the treacherous road that Ten, Gabi, and the others had to travel; although I’ll say more about said rotating cast, what Holborn excelled at was the balance between action and character development. It’s a hard balance to hit, but there was enough down time between Ten getting out of horrific scrapes for the two protagonists to actually react, change, and strengthen their relationships. The fight scenes didn’t go on for extensive periods (although they easily could have), but the quieter, more character-driven moments didn’t dominate the narrative either.
However, I can’t say the same for the characters. I get that it’s a staple of Westerns in general to have a cast that constantly shifts and changes, but given that most of the characters that were introduced in Ten Low eventually came back in some way, shape, or form, it was kind of a handful to juggle every single one of their names and significances, especially since their first appearances were a flash in the pan. Not only did that make them difficult to keep track of, it dulled the emotional weight when we were supposed to mourn their deaths—somebody dies, and all I found myself thinking of was “wait, who was that again? Why do we care?” That being said, Holborn at least made them all colorful and at least fun while they had their brief moments in the spotlight—they were fun, but not much else, unfortunately. Ten and Gabi’s relationship was the centerpiece, and that’s exactly how it should have been.
All in all, a gritty, action-packed space Western with tropes turned on their heads in surprising—and incredibly entertaining—ways. 4 stars!
Ten Low is the first book in the Ten Low trilogy, followed by Hel’s Eight and the forthcoming Ninth Life. . Stark Holborn is also the author of the 12-book Nunslinger series, as well as the Triggernometry duology, which is set in the same universe.
Today’s song:
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
The Bookish Mutant 
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