Dreadnought by Cherie PriestI read Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker last year and really liked it. Then I ran into her at Steamcon, which was cool. I started following her on twitter last week (@cmpriest), and that lady has some funny going on. So I bought Dreadnought without having read it first, a breach of policy granted only to my most trusted authors. It was not a mistake.
Dreadnought is actually the third book in The Clockwork Century series, though the second, Clementine, is by a different publisher, and at 200ish pages is more of a hefty novella than a full scale novel of Boneshaker/Dreadnought proportions. Clementine is already out of print, or so I gather by the ridiculous prices for used copies on Teh Amazonz. I bought a Kindle edition and am trying to resurrect my 1st gen device to read it on, though I’m going to miss the book design of the other novels—brown ink!
All this is apropos of nothing, except that these are stories embedded in the lovingly textured Civil War era steampunk world that Priest has constructed. It’s a world I can heartily recommend to you, for where else shall you encounter airship pirates, canon bestrewn train engines, and a zombie infested Seattle, all in the same story?
My favorite thing about Priest’s novels are the leading ladies. I made this same comment on Boneshaker, and she’s done it again, possibly even better. Vinita “Mercy” Lynch is absolutely a woman of her era, and yet…
[I’ve written and deleted several strings of adjectives here.]
She’s really just a great character, and I’d like you to meet her. If you’re at all interested in alternate history and/or steampunk as genres, you’d be doing yourself a huge favor to get with Cherie Priest and her protagonists.
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