Boneshaker (Cherie Priest)

Boneshaker
Cherie Priest
Tor
Fiction, YA Fantasy
** (Bad)

DESCRIPTION: In the mid-19th century, the discovery of gold in the Klondike sponsored a technology race to develop the most efficient machinery for work in the frozen ground. The winner of the Russian bid was Dr. Leviticus Blue, who set about building his prototype machine in the basement of his house in the boom-town of Seattle. One evening, in 1863, Dr. Blue's Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine roared to life, cutting a swath of destruction under the city... and breaching an underground vein of noxious volcanic blight gas. The invisible substance boiled of the ground, sickening and killing those who breathed it - and turning many of them into "rotters," shambling undead monsters who feed upon the living. Downtown Seattle was sealed behind a great wall, and those who survived began a new, wretched life on the tainted Outskirts as they cursed the name of Leviticus Blue.
Sixteen years later, Blue's widow, Briar Wilkes, works in a factory in the outskirts and struggles to raise her headstrong son, Ezekiel, under the twin shadows of blight and her dead husband. Further compounding the issue is her grandfather, Maynard Wilkes, captain of the Seattle police, who made a point of releasing all the criminals from the jailhouse before the blight killed them, losing his own life in the process: law-abiding citizens were convinced he was on the take, while criminals still treat Maynard as an underworld saint. With so many voices telling him terrible things about his ancestry, and with Briar too embittered and exhausted to realize how fast he was growing up, she shouldn't have been surprised when Zeke took matters into his own hands. He sneaks back into the walled-up city with only a gas mask and a map, determined that he can find evidence to clear the name of his maligned father in their old house on Denny Hill. As soon as she figures out where he went, Briar sets out to find him.
The blight-filled city has long been considered dead to the outside world, but within the walls lie secrets - and dangers - for both Briar and Zeke.

REVIEW: I mentioned, a few books ago, that I was on a bit of a steampunk kick. This book promised steampunk, plus a local flavor (being a Pacific Northwesterner myself), and a touch of zombies for good measure. Unfortunately, most of the book reads like the blight gas: insubstantial, smoggy, and hard to tolerate for long stretches. Briar comes across as a cold-hearted woman who once joined an equally cold-hearted man in an entirely loveless marriage, then raised the resulting son without an iota of human affection or interest. Zeke comes across as the kind of idiotic kid who honestly believes that plunging blindly into a city full of poisonous gas, desperate criminals, and flesh-eating zombies will somehow make his life better. Not one person in the book displays anything but the most calloused and bigoted of faces, and few display much in the way of logic, planning, or basic common sense. The entire story feels polluted, clogged with stinking blight gas and crooked gangsters and general rust, filth, dirt, and grime; I felt like scrubbing my brain down with Lysol after each chapter just to get the gunk out. Most steampunk I've read at least presents nice, shiny-object ideas to contemplate, but Boneshaker fails on this front, too; the retro-future technology exists on the periphery, never brought into clear enough focus to serve as more than a vague backdrop for the unpleasant people doing illogical and unlikable things. As for the zombies, they're mostly a plot gimmick, popping up and wandering off whenever Priest needed to goose the action (and, likely not by coincidence, appealing to the bizarre popularity zombies seem to be enjoying of late.) The logic behind them left me scratching my head. If the rotters are as dumb and determined as is claimed, willing to beat themselves to pieces trying to reach fresh meat, it's ridiculous that so many of them survived for sixteen years. The blight gas itself is supposed to be a naturally-occurring volcanic phenomenon; the characters cynically declare that it's slowly filling the city walls and will eventually spill over and poison the Outskirts, then the world, so those who stayed behind in Seattle and learned to live among it are really pioneers of the future. On a planet as tectonically active as Earth, then, why hasn't blight gas already consumed the entire planet... or did one man's puny drill somehow unleash something that numerous massive meteor impacts and supervolcanic eruptions have failed to trigger? As for the plot... eh, I hardly cared whether or not Briar or Zeke found each other, since I cared equally little about them. Then there's the persistent the matter of Dr. Blue - whether he took money to sabotage the Boneshaker, whether he meant to rob the banks whose vaults he undermined in the disastrous test run, whether he may have survived... oh, but why bother? I didn't give a dang about any of the plot twists concerning him, perhaps the least likable of all the unlikable characters mentioned in Boneshaker. The final revelation made most of those plot twists - and the fretting that the characters did over them - almost laughable. As a kicker, Priest has a sequel out, set in the same universe if not necessarily using the same characters (Dreadnought.) Having barely struggled through to the overlong, eye-watering ending of Boneshaker, don't expect Dreadnought to turn up in my to-read bookpile.