Review: Waistcoats and Weaponry by Gail Carriger

Finishing School #3

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Published: 4th November 2014
Publisher: Atom
Format: ebook (available in paperback)
Price: £3.99 (Amazon.co.uk)

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Review: ‘Steam City Pirates’ by Jim Musgrave

Steam City Pirates

Pat O’Malley Steampunk Mysteries
Jim Musgrave
English Majors Editors and Publishers, LLC

Pub Date: Dec 1 2013

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Like Alice’s rabbit, a strange “mechanical-like man” leads 1869 New York Detective Pat O’Malley down into the world of steam power. A group from the future calling itself the World Scientific Advancement Society for Progress is living secretly beneath Central Park. These pirates are inventors whose only goal is to keep the Earth in the Steam Age in order to save it from a future nuclear holocaust. Five alien assassins from other universes are ordered to kill O’Malley and his group, and each alien has a unique ability to do the job. As the Steam City Pirates build a steam-powered amusement park on Coney Island, O’Malley and his group are hunted down in the streets of New York City. The future of the world is at stake in this mystery and adventure featuring a twisting plot, steampunk time travel, steam men duels, crafty inventions, and monsters from other planets.

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Review: A Study in Darkness Book 2 of The Baskerville Affair by Emma Jane Holloway

 

29th October 2013

Del Ray

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  • ISBN 9780345537195
  • $7.99
  • Mass Market Paperback

 

After the events of A study in silk Eveline Cooper was exiled to her Grandmamma Holmes’ Devon estate, Nick has given up the circus and his horses to become a pirate, captain of the Red Jack, Imogen Roth is fending off unsuitable suitors and Tobias Roth is engaged to the Gold King’s daughter Alice Keating, who is pregnant. Desperate for her company in Scotland Imogen persuades Alice to invite Eveline to visit them at the Keating shooting estate. After a joyous reunion all is turned upside down by Tobias’s unexpected arrival. The Gold King manipulates all concerned and Eveline is once more exiled, this time to Whitechapel. Her mission is to seek out the Blue King’s ‘maker’ – the person designing and creating his weapons and war machines.

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Review: A study in silks by Emma Jane Holloway

silks

  • Random House Publishing Group – Del Rey Spectra
  • 24th September 2013
  • ISBN 9780345537188
  • $7.99
  • EditionMass Market Paperback

I recently had the pleasure of reading an uncorrected proof copy of this, the first title in Emma Jane Holloway’s trilogy ‘The Baskerville Affair’. The next part, ‘A study in darkness’ will be published later this month and the final part ‘A study in ashes’ will be published in December. I have already started reading the second book and have requested the third.

But what are these novels about?

As the title suggests, these are a riff on the Sherlock Holmes canon (for my friends in the fandom it’s an AU fanfic). Set in an alternative Steampunk Victorian England ruled by ‘Steam Barons’ who control the power supply and ruthlessly suppress competition using any and all means possible. Eveline Cooper, the orphaned daughter of Sherlock Holmes’s disgraced younger sister and the army captain she eloped with, is making her entrance into Society with her dearest friend Imogen Roth, daughter of Lord Bancroft, former Ambassador to Vienna.

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Does Regency/Georgian era Steampunk exist?

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I quite like Steampunk as a genre and I’m reading a couple of Steampunk novels for review at the moment, but I’d like to know why they are all set in the mid to late nineteenth century and if there is anyone writing steampunk set in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries?
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Review: ‘Etiquette & Espionage’ by Gail Carriger

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Finishing School Book the First
2013
Atom

Fourteen years old and not at all ladylike, thats Sophronia Angelina Temminnick. She’s the youngest of the Temminnick girls and a terrible bother to her mother. After an incident involving a dumb waiter and a trifle, Sophronia is packed off to finishing school.

But Madam Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality is not quite what she expects. After an eventful journey she arrives to find a werewolf waiting and no obvious way aboard.

Making several new friends and learning to be ladylike, Sophronia becomes embroiled in a plot which sees her clambering around engine rooms, confronting thieves and setting fire to her mother’s gazebo. She also learns how to curtsey properly and to dance.

Set several decades before the author’s previous series, ‘The Alexia Tarrabotti Series’ and featuring characters from that series as children, this book is an admirable addition to her body of work and suitable for YA readers. The characters are interesting, well-rounded and develop as the novel progresses. The plot is engaging and mystery elements intriguing.

I enjoyed Gail Carriger’s earlier books and would recommend this new series. Now I just need to get the next book in the series.

Bye

Rose