Title: Boneshaker Series: Clockwork Century #1
Author: Cherie Priest
Published: September 29, 2009
Genre(s): Fantasy
Page Count: 416
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus was Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born.
But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead.
Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue’s widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history.
His quest will take him under the wall and into a city teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive.
There are times when you begin reading a book and you can tell right away it won’t be anything close to a 4 or 5 star read. Boneshaker was very much like that for me. I didn’t dislike Priest’s story enough to stop reading, but I did wind up skimming practically the entire thing. It’s unfortunate that such a big hit in the steampunk world ended up not being a personal favorite.
I think my first impression regarding this book was that Cherie Priest’s writing was somewhat subpar. There was a distinct feeling of amateurism that I picked up from the first three chapters that never wholly left me throughout the text. Boneshaker is full of clunky, expository dialogue, info-dumps, overwritten action scenes, and telling rather than showing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the writing is outright bad, but this book definitely shows signs of coming from an author who hasn’t completely developed her skills.
The story itself was also something of a disappointment. 15-year-old Zeke sneaks into a dangerous, zombie-infested quarantine area just because…well, just because. His mother goes into the same quarantine area in order to save him. What follows is then a look at mother and son bumbling around with zombies and other strange people, constantly missing each other, until a really anticlimactic conclusion wrapped things up. Overall, I just felt kind of unaffected by Priest’s storyline, because the only resolution required was a brief conversation between mother and son, but because of a ridiculous amount of obstacles thrown in to delay the conversation, we actually have a book. So basically this is 400 pages of waiting around for Briar to tell Zeke about his father. Basically.
As I said, I skimmed most of Boneshaker. I found that much of what was going on in this story was either uninteresting or not of great importance. I was able to catch the gist of the story by fully reading maybe one paragraph in five. Priest has a tendency to overwrite, and additionally, her storytelling just wasn’t interesting enough to catch my attention and hold me throughout a 400 page jaunt through steampunkish zombies.
Perhaps this book might have been better if had actually felt like steampunk. I mean, yes, there’s some poisonous gas that turns people into zombies, and there are zeppelins and some clockwork prosthetics, but…eh. Vague mentions of the American Civil War and Klondike Gold Rush didn’t really ground this as an alternate history the way most steampunk tends to feel, and though I hate when the genre gets too focused on crazy inventions and machinery, maybe we could have had a little more? And maybe some zombies that were actually scary? Because the zombies in this book were just boring, and barely even mentioned, even in the middle of a zombie-chase action scene. Strange, that.
All in all, Boneshaker could definitely have been better. It had certain moments, and I was interested enough to see how things turned out for our mother and son duo, but…eh. Priest’s writing didn’t do it for me, and the story itself wasn’t phenomenal either. I’ve definitely read better in the genre.
