First, some shameless self-congratulations: Cannonball! I was originally thinking I could only do a half, which I signed up for, but here I am with a full 52! Yay me 🙂 OK, moving on. Steampunk Tea Party is probably the best Christmas present I’ve gotten in a long while. Long Live Book Exchange! It’s part cookbook, part photo book, and part short story collection. Each of the six chapters has a theme with recipes, excerpts from character voices, pictures of characters in elaborate costumes, pictures […]
Oops I did it again
I have done this twice recently: started a series part way through by mistake. Funny thing is, it’s a similar sort of series and the mistake will probably have similar effects. The Iscariot Sanction is Book 2 of the Apollonian Casefiles series (which is apparently aka the Lazarus Gate series?). It is somewhat steampunk, somewhat secret agent adventure, and somewhat a buddy-cop style story. There are some supernatural happenings in late nineteenth century London, and a secret society connected to the government is investigating/protecting the […]
Broken steampunk promise
I was ready to like Stormdancer, love it even. But when you promise me “a stunningly original dystopian steampunk world with a flavor of feudal Japan”, that’s what I should get. The dystopian label is fine; I take no issue with that. The book delivers. If this back cover blurb were more accurate, it should say “feudal Japanese world with steampunk flavor”. The book is far more historical fiction than it is steampunk, and the two elements don’t meld together very well at all. This […]
I think many of us would like to visit this library
3.5 stars Irene is an agent of the Library, a place that exists outside normal space and time. In fact, as long as the agents and librarians that work for the Library are there, they do not age in the slightest. Only when they are out in the different worlds of the multiverse, do they visibly age, and how much depends how time passes in the various worlds they find themselves. As an agent of the Library, Irene is sent to retrieve books that are […]
How to waste an unbelievably cool premise in execution.
I was realllly looking forward to this book. I mean, come on. An alternate history exploring what it would have been like if the Congo Free State (shudder) never existed due to the invention of steampunk-like technologies. Instead, and I’m gonna steal from the blurb here, “Fabian Socialists from Great Britain join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo’s ‘owner,’ King Leopold II. This land, named Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of […]
Not much “there”, there.
The Dark Unwinding and its sequel A Spark Unseen are set in Victorian England and France, respectively, and have a vaguely steampunk theme that doesn’t go full-tilt but still includes a lot of clever era-appropriate tinkering and inventing. I review them together because while they, technically, stand alone, they are incredibly similar in tone and structure and I had similar problems with both of them. The Dark Unwinding begins when Katharine Tulman is sent from London, where she resides with her aunt and young cousin, […]
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