30 Days of Books: Day 03

[brigid]

Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.

Day 03 – The best book you’ve read in the last 12 months

I really hate questions like this, because I’ve read several good books in the past 12 months and really can’t select one outstanding book from all of them. So instead, I’m going to go with the best book I’ve read in the past month that was published within the past 12 months.

And that book is Boneshaker (Sci Fi Essential Books) by Cherie Priest.

This is a tightly written steam punk novel set shortly after the Klondike Gold Rush, in Seattle. Kind of. Priest takes some liberties with history, putting this world very AU even without the dirigibles and zombies and mechanical arms. There’s two POV characters, a teen aged boy and a middle aged woman (yay for more female protags). Priest also addresses one of the failings of Steam Punk as a genre, and has people who aren’t White as characters… characters who are affected by institutionalized racism. They aren’t main characters, at least in the book (there are others coming out, set in the same world) but they have lives and experiences that transcend the white protagonists, and stories of their own.