Grac's book blog

'Boneshaker' by Cherie Priest

'Boneshaker' by Cherie Priest - I first came across Cherie Priest's writing when I read one of her earlier books, the first of a series of Southern Gothic stories called 'Four and Twenty Blackbirds' and I'd heard all sorts of good things about her steampunk books so was very happy to pick up 'Boneshaker' via my local library.

The basic idea behind the book is that, back in the middle of the 19th century when an alternate US was still fighting its Civil War many years on, there had been something of a gold rush around Seattle. The main characters in the book are, respectively, the wife and son of a man who was responsible for Seattle being devastated, when the device he had been building to mine gold more effectively instead opened up the source of the Blight, a gas that basically creates zombies.

Ezekiel never knew his father and becomes obsessed with the idea there are still things inside their former family home that can be sold, as his mother is currently working herself to death to keep the two of them alive. Seattle is a walled city, to keep in the victims of the Blight, and when Ezekiel goes in then his mother has no alternative but to follow.

I'm not completely sure what I was expecting from 'Boneshaker' as my experience with steampunk books has so far been a bit mixed - the issue often is whether or not the author cares as much about the characters involved as they do about the setting. This isn't an issue with Priest, who is able to manage both with admirable competency. She's written another book in the same universe so far, 'Dreadnought', which isn't a sequel proper but is already on my want-to-read list...

 

'The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie' by Alan Bradley

'The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie' by Alan Bradley - another first-book-in-series experience, which is always a bit of a lottery, if I'm perfectly honest.

Our protagonist is a precocious 10 year old, Flavia de Luce, a self-taught chemical genius and all round know-it-all and the story of 'The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie' is all told from her perspective. When a dead body is found in the garden and a dead bird on the kitchen doorstep with a stamp impaled on its beak, Flavia soon becomes embroiled in the mystery, particularly as her father appears to be the main suspect.

For me, where this story falls down is in two aspects: firstly Flavia herself, who is a little too knowledgeable about everything, and then secondly in the author's use of a lengthy conversation between Flavia and her father which serves as an infodump to explain the plot and backstory. This is one of the downsides of using restricted third person as a way of writing, regardless of whether or not the narrator is reliable (on which in this case the jury is still out) - because the reader can only know what Flavia knows, there are few ways to pass on significant chunks of information.

The series continues with 'The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag' and I'm afraid Flavia and I will be parting company prior to that...

'Savage Season' by Joe R. Lansdale

'Savage Season by Joe R. Lansdale - picked this one up in a swap, mostly because I'm often on the lookout for first books in reasonably-long series that I haven't read before and this sounded interesting...

Our protagonists in 'Savage Season' are Hap and Leonard, two unlikely friends who appear at first to have little in common but who manage to get one another out of scrapes on a regular basis, if this first book is anything to go by. In this particular story, Hap is visited by his ex-wife who leads him around by the metaphorical short and curlies and gets both of them involved in a plan to find some stolen cash that was hidden away by a bankrobber years earlier.

Naturally, this apparently straightforward plan is not without its complications, although I was a little disappointed to find that the book is barely a novel in length, which means that the overall denouement isn't quite that long in coming. There are twists and turns aplenty, even so, with promise of more to come as the series goes on, which it does in 'Mucho Mojo'.

'Cowboy Angels' by Paul McAuley

'Cowboy Angels' by Paul McAuley - I picked up this one at the library after I read and liked something else by this author ('The Quiet War') late last year.

The basic premise behind 'Cowboy Angels' is around the existence of what are called Turing Gates, essentially devices that allow people and things to travel into alternate universes. Each universe, usually described as a 'sheaf', has differentiated itself from the one we know in some way - the main place we see, calling itself the Real, is very clearly not the US we're familiar with, though that particular sheaf also plays a significant role in the storyline.

The main characters include Adam Stone, one of the eponymous Cowboy Angels, a group of orphans trained by the CIA-equivalent in the Real to be special operatives in a number of alternate worlds. For years, the policy of the Real had been to try and create a Pan-American alliance between universes, but then the election of Jimmy Carter puts a stop to all that and Stone heads off somewhere quiet till he's called back into action when a former colleague is working his way through sheaves, killing specific individuals in each.

Unfortunately, while I found the novel itself quite gripping, particularly in its depiction of the machinations of the various agencies, the ending kind of happened and didn't really resolve all that much. It hasn't stopped me from wanting to read more by this author - I'm planning to start with his first book next, '400 Billion Stars', the first in a trilogy.

'The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein' by Peter Ackroyd

'The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein' by Peter Ackroyd - taking the story of Frankenstein as its basis, Ackroyd begins his tale with the fascination of Frankenstein for the concept of electricity and its connection with life. Rather than toiling away in a gloomy castle, this Frankenstein conducts his experiments in England, many of them in the heart of London, relying on the resurrectionists for fresh corpses.

Naturally, when he does succeed, Frankenstein discovers that creating life is not as simple as he had first thought. Alongside his scientific endeavours, he has an ongoing friendship with the poet Shelley, coming through him to associate with other names connected with the novel as it was eventually written.Not a book I'll be returning to, because it doesn't ever really seem to go anywhere or achieve anything, so I was ultimately disappointed by it.

In direct contrast, I'm currently reading and very much enjoying 'Cowboy Angels' (by Paul McAuley) which is all about travelling through alternate universes, so maybe genre fic is more my strength?

'Ashes of the Elements' by Alys Clare

'Ashes of the Elements' by Alys Clare - this is the second book in this series, following on from 'Fortune Like the Moon' and featuring the sleuthing duo of Abbess Helewise and Josse D'Acquin.

The abbess has a nasty surprise waiting for her at the edge of the nearby forest when she literally trips over the corpse of a local man, who was killed (in the opinion of the stereotypical incompetent local lawman) by the mysterious 'forest people'. On his return from France, Josse finds himself drawn into the mystery, not to mention trying to figure out exactly where two wayward charges of the nunnery come into all of this.

Unfortunately, while I quite liked the first book in this series, I found this one more difficult to enjoy. While I'm by no means a prude, there's a sex scene in the middle of the book that the writer lingers on a little too much for my liking, and she's also already playing the whole 'is there a woman beneath the nun's robes?' card too heavily. I doubt I'll be going out of my way to read any more of this series, which continues with 'The Tavern in the Morning'.