Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
What a fun book this is! I am a big Steampunk fan (see my Halloween costume this year!) and I’ve eyed this book for a long time because no book with a dirigible on the front and a woman wearing goggles could be anything but Steampunk! And I was right.
Now, I’ll grant you that this is never going to win a Pulitzer prize. It is not Shakespeare. But then again, wouldn’t life be boring if we all walked around speaking in Iambic Pentameter? (unless, of course, we are villains in a Ron Rash novel. and no one would ever call Serena boring!)
This is a story about a woman, her son on the cusp of adulthood, family secrets and embracing who you are and who you aren’t. It’s about airship pirates, bartenders with mechanical arms, a walled city filled with deadly gas and, therefore, it is also about gas masks, too. Oh, and zombies. For spice.
Nothing like some spicy zombies!
One of the interesting things for me in this book is something that fascinates me in human nature in the real world, too: our ability to adapt. Humans are infinitely capable of adaption, survival, finding ways to keep on living and even, in some cases, exploit and use the very things that are imprisoning us. The characters in this novel do that emotionally, socially and economically and they do so both above and below ground!
A good and fun adventure!
I’m now on to another novel by Cherie Priest called Dreadnought.
Life in a Mountain Town 