Boneshaker

No Hipsters. I'm not taking about the bike you wish you could ride around Bellingham with your yellow skinny jeans, green scarf, and purple Member's Only Jacket. No, I'm taking about Boneshaker the novel.

This little Steampunk novel won the PNWA book award. It takes place in an alternate history where Stonewall Jackson didn't die and the Civil War continues on with the South getting slowly demolished, yet they hang on. Technology has been pushed into dangerous and sometimes amazing directions. Anyway, whatever, you can get all that from the first chapter and reading about the book online. The setting is Seattle, where a wall has been put up around the core of the city. Inside there is a zombie-making gas called "the blight" but as the reader finds out there are non-zombie people living in there, many of them involved with a drug trade (turning the blight gas into a sort of heroin that eventually kills its user). It's cool to read about these old-times, altered, but still somehow accurate about certain things--parts of old-Seattle. Sure, there is a sense that the author Cherie Priest tries a little too hard with her prose (only in a few sections, when she feels the need to over-describe something with metaphor or the use of adjectives), and there are moments of dialogue-exposition that really don't belong (or may have seem needed while writing, but really over explains the science of the gas/world), there's a twist, followed by a decision that really lacks any organic feeling, and really reads like the author was trying to steer the ending into a certain direction (maybe she already had the last chapter written...you'll see what I mean if you read it).

BUT, that said, I couldn't put this book down. I read it fast. Two days, just a couple sittings. And the world is amazing, the story is great, the characters are pretty decent to really great. The twist and turns can seem a little deus ex machina (did I spell that right?), but I turned off my lit-prof brain and read the book as a reader. I was floored on it. In retrospect I look back and see the flaws, but I also see that Cherie Priest is a fine writer with a wonderful imagination, AND if she had written a Saga like Twilight many of us would be sing a different tune. Unfortunately, Twilight was written by a writer who doesn't know how to right real conflict, real emotional content and depth, or real dialogue. (Sorry for this seque-way, I had a very violent reaction the other day to the Saga and that writer. I read them all, but the more distance I put between that final page and me, the more I feel like the writer has no guts, no tact, and no clue how to write! She can entertain, but not even that well. She uses surfaces and familiarity to charge her work, and damn, that makes me mad).

OK. Back to Priest and Boneshaker. The world she created is called the Clockwork Century. Read about it. It's pretty cool stuff. Makes me want to write a Steampunk novel. Makes me want to create a world like that.

With all the things I mentioned, I still think you should pick up a copy of the book and read it. If you like it read the rest of her novels (there are a handful that take place during the Clockwork Century), then tell your friends. For one, she lives in Seattle, thus she is a NW writer. And two, this is a fun read that doesn't point to its craft, instead the focus is merely the story (And even those moments where I think she's trying to hard, I feel like that is my observations AFTER reading, not during), and it draws you in from page one till the end.

Peace out homies.

Joshuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa