Alice Payne Arrives
The Alice Payne series, Book 1
Kate Heartfield
Tordotcom
Fiction, Adventure/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: In 1788, Englishwoman Alice Payne leads a secret life. By day, she's the respectable spinster daughter of a moneyed colonel, crippled in mind and body by the conflicts in the American colonies. By night, however, she is the Holy Ghost, masked highwayman and terror of the nearby roadways, mystique further enhanced by a clockwork automaton assistant... and if the fact that the Holy Ghost only ever strikes monstrous, wealthy leches hasn't been noticed by the constabulary, well, that is their problem, not hers. Besides, it's not like she's a robber only for thrills or vengeance; between the upkeep on the estate and her father's drinking and gambling problems, her ill-gotten gains are the only boundary between the Payne family and utter ruin. But one evening, what should be an ordinary robbery goes strangely awry when the carriage inexplicably disappears on the roadway. When Alice investigates, she discovers a strange clockwork device - and when she and her special friend Jane start poking around, they make a most marvelous discovery...
In 1889, Major Prudence Zuniga races to prevent the Austrian archduke's son from committing a suicide pact - again. For ten years, she's relived the same disastrous string of events over and over again, and all she's managed to do is change the name of the young woman he takes to the grave with him. It's part of an ongoing time war between two factions, the Farmers and the Guides, who each exploit time travel to reshape history as they each believe it "should" have gone... and both are doing little but mess everything up until the far future is nothing but utter, unlivable chaos. Her own life keeps getting rewritten, as does every soldier's, changes she only knows of due to a diary she keeps sequestered away in a secret spot of uncorrupted time. And she is tired of it. Unbeknownst to her superiors, she has a plan to sabotage the entire time travel network - a plan that involves making contact with a tinkerer in 1788 England...
Or, at least it did, until Prudence opens her portal in 2070 Toronto and the Holy Ghost rides out of history.
REVIEW: I had a specific window of time to fill at work, and this audiobook looked like it would do the job. A little steampunk, a dash of swashbuckling, a sprinkling of time travel hijinks... it sounded entertaining enough. Unfortunately, it never quite comes together before it hits the cliffhanger ending.
Things kick off with some promise, with Alice in her "Holy Ghost" role anticipating the thrill of another ambush on a scoundrel nobleman who deserves to have his purse lightened - but, even early on, there's something just a touch off-kilter. The style and writing, the actions and reactions of the characters themselves, often feel more like they belong in a young adult novel, as though they're in their teens or (at most) early twenties. But Alice is in her thirties, and other characters we meet are pushing forty or more. I kept having to remind myself of their ages, because my mind kept trying to roll them back. Anyway, the tale establishes a few separate times and the overall concept. Alice and Jane, ignorant of time travel (at first), are just trying to keep Alice's father and estate above water, even as Jane (her household companion and, more recently, lover) provides cover, having crafted the automaton that's become the Holy Ghost's signature... an automaton who really doesn't have much of a plot purpose, except to show that Jane is a proto-gearhead and introduce a little steampunk flair in a story otherwise lacking in steampunk anything. When Alice encounters the impossible device after the inexplicable carriage disappearance, she and Jane are quick to figure out that it's not fairy magic or deviltry but some manner of science - and, given the desperate state of the Payne household, Alice hardly hesitates to try using it for her own advantage.
Meanwhile, Major Prudence suffers one defeat too many in her efforts to change the would-be archduke's fate; when she's pulled from the operation, perpetually thwarted by manipulations from Guide enemies (which she, as a Farmer loyalist, derisively calls Misguideds, though to be honest the lines between the two are rather blurry and hardly seem to matter from the standpoint of a timeline irretrievably polluted by meddling across the board), she becomes more determined than ever to pull the proverbial trigger in her secret project to bring down time travel. But one of her first efforts (that we see) is bungled quite spectacularly, only salvaged when a bystander leaps into the fray. Alice Payne rather bowls over Prudence insofar as adapting on the fly and taking charge, which is probably why the series is named after her, but Prudence still tries to cheat and manipulate her into becoming another tool in her plan. Somewhere along the way I started feeling like the author was trying to cheat and manipulate me as a reader, too... and when the whole thing ended on a cliffhanger, I was more certain of that than ever.
The story moves relatively fast (most of the time, at least), and has some nice parts and ideas. The time travel problems and politics, though, get a little convoluted and don't quite mesh well with the swashbuckling, vaguely steampunk parts. I just plain didn't like Prudence, though I ultimately wasn't especially attached to anyone, and don't feel compelled to find out what happens next.
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