Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
I’ll lead this review off with the comment I left on Ms. Priest’s blog post on the TOR website immediately after receiving Boneshaker in the mail:
Got my copy in the mail today!! SQUEEEE! And I’m totally blowing off everything in my TBR pile after finishing the one review I’ve obligated myself to. SQUEEEEE!!
Oh, and before I forget…
SQUEE.
The easiest way to describe Boneshaker is to say that I read it in less than three days. I usually save my reading for work or the bus ride there and back, but I read this one during my downtime as well. I didn’t remember to download the new episodes of Dexter and Heroes until Wednesday. And the squee never stopped.
Boneshaker is set in an alternate version of Seattle around 1880. The Civil War is still dragging out back East, and the western frontier is more heavily populated than during our history due to the Klondike gold rush happening sooner. A twisted scientist is hired to create a machine to break through the Alaskan ice for gold, and things go awry, devastating Seattle and releasing a poisonous, zombie-creating gas from beneath the Earth’s surface.
Enter Briar Wilkes, the widow of the aforementioned mad doctor, and their teenage son, Ezekiel. Sixteen years after the disaster that ended in two square miles of zombie-infested Seattle being walled off, Zeke figures he can prove his father’s innocence by crawling under the wall and into the city his parents used to call home. Briar chases after, resulting in a nonstop adventure garnished with lavish imagery, clever inventions, steampunk technology, airships, pirates and the living dead.
I fell in absolute LUST with Boneshaker a month before it’s release, at http://theclockworkcentury.com/. You can read a short story set in Priest’s steampunk universe, an excerpt from Boneshaker, and catch news and updates on related projects, to include the upcoming novella, Clementine, and the sequel to Boneshaker, Dreadnought.
5,000,123,890/10. There’s still a couple months to go, but this might be the best book I’ve read in 2009.