Ursula

Rebecca Fraimow, The Iron Children.

In this forthcoming novella, a young woman named Asher finds herself in command of a group of Dedicates--soldiers given iron bodies to fight a desperate, defensive war--on the edge of a mountain in winter. But one of her Dedicates is a spy.

I have a soft spot for the military-fiction trope of the sergeant who knows way more about what's going on than their commanding officer, and the sergeant in Iron Children is pretty great. But this isn't, fundamentally, a story about who's going to win the war. It's about what it means to be an ordinary person living through one piece of it.

I know Fraimow's writing from her historical fiction about being queer and Jewish. Though Iron Children's Dedicates are commanded by a military order of nuns, this feels like a story with a Jewish ethos: the characters belong to (multiple, distinct) religious minorities, and each individual has to figure out what being ethical means on their own, and then live up to it. There are gripping snow-survival moments and knotty questions about agency. Sometimes these are literalized questions about who controls a Dedicate's iron body, presented with the kind of intensity and specificity that fantasy does best.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC. Fun fact: it's a novella that's coming out from Solaris! It's nice to see more imprints publishing fiction at this length.)