A great sci-fi novella, tightly crafted - a group of soldiers with a new commander are trying to get off a mountain, but they have an enemy in their midst. Aaaaand the soldiers are cyborgs. Do they want to be? Ethical concerns! With cyborgs! In a war! I finished this and immediately wanted to read more about this world.

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.

The setting is a good combination of science fiction and sci-fi. Mysterious location which can be earth or not. And that is the way this book also is written, as at several occasions it confused me which person I was reading about.

I also wondered several times if this short book was a prequel or sequel to an existing book series.

So if you can handle all of this, it is a good recommendation, but if you get easily confused it will be harder to read.

Thanks to NetGalley for the upfront copy of this book.

Fantastic science fiction read with a lot of suspense and mystery! Loved it! Wonderful main characters. Entrancing storyline.

I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.

This fantasy novella is the perfect mix between Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe series (soldiers campaigning in the grit and grime of the Napoleonic wars) and Martha Wells's Murderbot, and I'm pretty sure that anyone who's enjoyed either of those two other series will enjoy this one. There are three PoV characters in this novella, all with very different motivations. Asher is a novice in training to become an elevated Sister-Commander, able to take over the adapted bodies of all of her Dedicates (foot soldiers) in the field to enforce the most perfect strategic efficiency in battle. She was only supposed to be coming on this expedition to learn from the Sister-Commander in charge, but when the Sister-Commander is killed in a raid, she's left in charge of a band of soldiers she doesn't know or understand and has to find a way to navigate them all through a perilous, wintry mountain terrain.

Luckily for Asher, she has Barghest, the loyal sergeant in the group who believes in the country's cause and has therefore shoved down all of their own simmering rage about the personal price of it for all of their life so far. Unfortunately for Asher, one of the soldiers in their group is a spy, hiding behind a Dedicate's mask and body of armor and plotting murder along the way...even as they, too, get reluctantly caught up in the bonding activity of trying to survive as a unit in impossible physical conditions.

Not one of them is anything but sympathetic by the end, and they all have good reasons for their beliefs and motivations. There is so much nuance and complexity to every issue they're facing, from the war that they've all been caught up in to the decisions each side has made for their own cause (and which the other side considers unforgivable). This is really a character study, and I loved every one of the characters. I didn't know how it could possibly resolve in a way that felt right for everybody - but I loved the actual ending of the novella, which I would not have predicted.

I really, really enjoyed this!

This book was a really interesting examination of autonomy. It explored the discussions I was hoping I'd see in The First Sister (which I wasn't super into) in far fewer pages, but I would be doing this novella a disservice if I only compared it to existing works. Asher and Barghest, two of the POV characters, had an interesting and compelling dynamic. (Sidenote, I loved how Asher's dialogue was written). I liked how both their individual arcs and the development of their friendship served the themes of this story. At first, I was worried that three points of view might be a lot for such a short novella, but the multi-POV format worked really well for this story, and the author did some cool stuff with POV switches in one scene toward the end. This is a really cool, richly detailed novella that I will probably reread multiple times.

Disclaimer: I read very little science fiction in general, so aspects of my review may be down to a lack of familiarity with genre conventions.

Novellas seem to have gained increasing popularity in the past few years, especially in the SFF genre. I've read a good dozen of them, and found that they are almost all plagued with the same problem: the authors are trying to jam too much plot/character/worldbuilding into a too-small bag, and the results are confusing, overwhelming, and lacking on every front. I don't say this, per se, as a criticism of the authors - they're often reaching for very interesting ideas. The blame is to be laid at the feet of whichever editors have been working on these novellas, who see unwilling to advise their authors to cut down on what they're attempting to accomplish. The novella is a distinct art form in its own right, but publishing currently seems to view them as novels lite, and it does a disservice to everyone involved.

Rebecca Fraimow is doing a lot of fascinating things with this book; the problem is, there's simply no space for them all to breathe in the novella's limited page time. We have a race of robot warrior nuns who are at war with another country, whose own state religion (at least, I think it's a state religion - it's not really explained) views the existence of robot nuns as blasphemous. We have a cast of at least a dozen, with three POV characters and other assorted NPCs who make up the supporting cast. Each narrator has their own character arc - one is assuming command for the first time, one is passing the torch, and one is a spy in their midst inherent on killing them all before they reach their destination. Any one of these threads could make up a whole book on its own, but they're forced to elbow for very limited space, which results in every aspect being underserved. I think Fraimow is a talented writer with a lot of interesting ideas; it's just a shame that her work isn't being given room to breathe.

I enjoyed reading this, it was what I was hoping for when requesting this, I enjoyed getting to know Asher as a main character. It had a great concept and I was hooked in this universe, it was what I expected and really had a great time reading this. Rebecca Fraimow has a great writing style and it was what I was hoping for.

"She tried subvocalizing, formulating words in the back of her throat without speaking. Ah—we fell into the ravine somewhere around there, I think? In Tvell’s body, she looked down at the great gash in the landscape below her feet; in her own, she looked up. From neither set of eyes could she see the other—at least not without leaning Tvell’s heavy body forward, which she wasn’t going to do without a much better sense of how to safely balance it. All the others are with me, except for Dirk and Baselard."

I suspect this is a "it's me not you" situation so I'm rounding up my rating a lot. I can SEE where this novella is compelling and cool but it just did not work for me. Also, I hate the cover but that's not related.