Steampunk! Book Review by ChristineMM
My Star Rating: 2 stars out of 5 = I Don’t Like It
My Summary Statement: A Motley Mix of Creepily Dark and Nonsensical Stories
This is a steampunk themed short story collection for young adult readers aged 14 and up. There are 14 stories. The subtitle promises these to be “fantastically rich and strange”; I disagree and feel it would be more accurate to say “creepily dark and nonsensical stories”. Some are just boring and silly.
Most are typical stories, most of which we’ve heard before (wild west train robberies, suffering kids in an orphanage) but the writers change them up to become steampunk by inserting odd words which we do not know the meaning of nor do we ever find out. The steampunk terms can be anything from using old Wild West terms or Victorian England terms, made up words or words that have fallen out of fashion long ago. Although the words should set the mood or help the reader understand the story most of the time they came off as confusing and weird for being weird’s sake, not for story enhancement. Oh, and to add to the steampunk genre, they threw in some weird inventions, magic, or time travel. When and where these stories are set varies from the present, a hundred years ago, Ancient Rome, there is definitely variety here.
I was really disappointed with this book and reading it cover to cover was what I’d say was slogging through it so that I could do a thorough review. To me there was one really well told story: The Summer People by Kelly Link. One was a notch below that: Clockwork Fagin by Cory Doctorow. I give M.T. Anderson’s The Oracle Engine a nod for an original story but was bored by the war theme and the setting being Ancient Rome. The idea behind Everything Amiable and Obliging by Holly Black was a good one but the details of the story grossed me out. I thought Some Fortunate Future Day by Cassandra Clare was a decent story but it needed just a bit more editing to make us see why the girl fell in love with the man as there was not much shown that would lead us to think he was so appealing.
Some things in this book are dark and violent. As a parent I will share some details to give you an idea what I mean so you can see if this is a book that’s right for your kids. Children in an orphanage being beat to a pulp and tortured, held in a jail cell, and starved, by the man who runs the orphanage, with more intentional verbal abuse to break kids to get them to be submissive to their master. In one story (by Clare) I swore it was going to turn to something else that actually would have made fodder for an R-rated horror movie (but it didn’t, it may have been a better story if it did). Steam Girl had some really descriptive passages about why the teen boy lusted after the teen girl that went a bit too far.
My biggest issue, deserving of its own paragraph was surprisingly by Holly Black whose work I respected in the tween book series made into a movie: The Spiderwick Chronicles. She lost some respect here, with her story’ starting off with a bang describing a robot filled gambling parlor and bar who ran a house of prostitution stocked with robots. There is mention of human men having sexual affairs with robots to cheat on their wives. (The robots are programmed to do anything a human tells them to do. They are true slaves.) The bar scene with entertainment for visitors of a boy child robot in bondage and being whipped and a prettied up girl child robot performing an oral action on a big lollipop to elude to I think you know what, was too over the top mature for the young adult market. Her idea of a woman falling in love with a male robot dance partner was an interesting one but that other stuff was too disgusting. I don’t think that fourteen year old’s need to have stories with kinky sex scenes, the idea of sex with robots programmed to be slaves to any human desire goes too far in and of itself.
The rest of the stories were mediocre, confusing, silly or dumb. I would like to believe that these could have been worked on a bit more, edited more, developed just a bit more deeply, and they could have been much better. This is a hodgepodge book of mostly mediocre writing.
What moved my review from “It’s okay” to “I Don’t Like It” = 2 stars was the mature content. I truly slogged through this. I’m tempted to rate it 1 star but I’ll hold back and stick with 2 stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC of this book from the Amazon.com Vine program for the purpose of writing a review on the Amazon.com website. I was under no obligation to promote the book on my blog or to give it a favorable rating. For my full disclosure statement see the link near the top of my blog’s sidebar.