The protagonist, Tom Raines, is a scrappy, 14-year-old video game addict living in a casino. He is recruited by the military conglomerate because of his reflexes. He enters the Pentagonal Spire (a military academy) and discovers that while he is fighting a war, the real enemy might be the adults manipulating him.
S.J. Kincaid: Crafting Dystopian Worlds and Intricate Power Dynamics s.j. kincaid
Before her success in publishing, Kincaid wrote several novels that remained unpublished. She was nearly finished with nursing school when her seventh manuscript, Insignia , was sold to HarperCollins in 2011. She originally aspired to be an astronaut but turned to writing after realizing her math skills weren't suited for the field. She has lived in various locations, including Scotland, where she lived next to a "haunted graveyard" that inspired her to pursue writing full-time. Writer Nurses Craft Until Diabolically Good Things Happen The protagonist, Tom Raines, is a scrappy, 14-year-old
Underrated queen of morally grey heroines. 👑 She originally aspired to be an astronaut but
Throughout the novel (and its sequel, The Empress ), Kincaid explores whether a creature designed to hate can learn to love. The romance subplot (with the gentle, brilliant Cygna) is tense and uncomfortable because Nemesis views affection as a weaponizable weakness. The Diabolic is brutal, violent, and philosophically dense. It asks: What is worse—a human acting like a monster, or a monster learning to act human?