Right, first off I'll apologize for not posting on Monday. The weekend was nuts and I was very stressed out as a result. I didn't have the wherewithal to do a post. I'll do better, I promise!
Today I am going to do my first book review!
POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!
Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest.
Disclosure: I am not a fan of the Steampunk genre. I don't have anything against it, but I guess I just don't get it either. Take it as you will.
The book is a little over 400 pages long, which makes for a decent read for most people, but I read really fast. It took me a day to finish it and I wasn't reading it non-stop.
Set in a fictional Seattle of the 1880s, the blurb on the cover says that it is a steampunk-zombie-airship adventure, and while it has all of those things it doesn't go particularly far with any of them. Airships, while integral to certain parts of the plot, actually have very little page time for one thing.
Zombies are set up early in the book, caused by a strange gas that seeps up from under Seattle. The gas becomes an omni-present threat in the book, but no attempt is really made to explain it or justify it. It just exists to make zombies. And apparently to make drugs, which is touched on as a moral grey point a couple of times between characters then never mentioned again.
As far as the steampunk part goes, I don't know if I would call it steampunk. It features a few weird science devices that are greeted with a somewhat muted response indicating, to me at least, that these things are not all that rare (not common, but not rare). But in the book only two "scientists" are ever mentioned, which may or may not mean anything to anyone. Also, as far as I can tell none of these devices are powered by steam. Electricity, mechanical operation, hydraulics, but no steam. This is probably me nitpicking, and I could very well be wrong about the definition of steampunk.
The characters themselves are varied but not well fleshed out or convincing, and much of the story seems to hinge more upon the character of people who are dead than on those who are alive. Some characters are more than a little stereotyped (two out of three airship smuggler captains were Han Solos).
I think that the best I can say is that the pace moved forward at a breakneck speed.
All in all, I didn't like the book. It didn't do anything for me, it didn't pull me in or invest me in it. If you want something that has airships, weird science, guns, magic powers, and even a city of the dead full of zombies, I would recommend the Grimnoir Chronicles by Larry Correia.
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