Book Review: Boneshaker
In which my steam-powered opener opens a can of worms and I disagree with nearly the entire steampunk-loving world.
Set in a late 19th century America where, due to increased advances of technology, the civil war is still raging, Boneshaker paints a contrasting steampunk world removed from the Victorian frills of other novels in the same genre.
The inventor Leviticus Blue accidentally destroyed most of the developing town of Seattle when his gargantuan drilling machine, the boneshaker, went haywire and tore the city centre up. A thick gas permeated through the large crack in the earth that the boneshaker left behind and as a thick fog it quickly blanketed the street, turning everyone exposed to the gas for too long into the living dead. A wall was erected around the city in an attempt to keep the zombies and the causative agent from spreading further.
Fifteen years later, Blue’s son Zeke Wilkes ventures into Seattle to still his curiosity and to prove that his father was an innocent man. Trapped within the confines of Seattle, it is up to Blue’s widow, Briar Wilkes, to find and rescue her son.
With such an interesting backstory and the prospect of a rich alternate history filled with swashbuckling air-pirates and rotting zombies (zombies!), Boneshaker‘s failure to deliver is surprising. But not much of the frontier steampunk zeitgeist pervades the pages of Priest’s fine prose, nor do the characters show serious depth.
Secondary characters come and go on a whim, guided only by what the plot requires, and the main protagonists randomly move from location to other seemingly plot-driven location, but a true sense of perilous urgency — which is expected when the protagonists are racing against time… and the living dead — is lacking. Major events and chance meetings just come across as contrived, a necessity to bridge the gap between beginning and the sudden conclusion. Even worse, although the reason why she puts herself in danger is obvious and even continuously mentioned in word, Briar’s motivation is strangely absent in spirit.
For a work of fiction that has received so much critical acclaim (Locus, Hugo and Nebula Award nominee!), the book is just immensely underwhelming. There’s no doubt that Priest has talent, but in Boneshaker, this talent is masked by a mediocre plot and superficial characters. What’s left is nothing but a straightforward adventure story with loads of untapped potential. Hopefully, in Clementine, her upcoming book set in the same universe, Cherie Priest is able to use this potential to power the steampunk beast that remained slumbering in Boneshaker.
Audio Book:
The audio version is narrated by Kate Reading and geek-icon Wil Wheaton. Whereas Wheaton is infusing his narration of Zeke’s storyline with an almost teenage enthusiasm befitting the character, Reading’s passages, though expertly narrated, just sound uninspired.