Underground Airlines made a lot of Best of 2016 lists, and I was lucky enough to snap it up at the library before the hold list got too long. It’s a story about what the world would look like if the Civil War had never happened, and slavery was still legal in America. Not surprisingly, it’s kind of a horrifying look. The protagonist is something of a bounty hunter, tracking down escaped slaves before they can make it to Canada and freedom, and his personal […]
Tudor royals, books, shapeshifters and all manner of complications
According to history, when King Edward VI, Henry VIII’s son died young and childless, certain noblemen who wanted to make sure a ruler of the Protestant faith ruled the country put his young cousin Lady Jane Gray on the throne. She ruled for nine days, before Mary Tudor arrived with her armies, removed the poor girl and had her beheaded. This book bears a vague resemblance to that story. In the England of this story, the conflict in England isn’t between Catholics and Protestants, it’s […]
Indescribably mediocre YA steampunk.
I don’t know what happened here. How a book about an alternate history steampunk WWI where one side has Clankers, and the other genetically engineered flying beasts that double as airships could be so exceptionally uninteresting and generic, I really don’t know. Also one of the MC’s is the son of the murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand. And the other is a girl who dresses as a boy! Also, also it was narrated by Alan Cumming! And yet, my mind wandered constantly while listening, and I […]
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 […]