Review Tuesday: Steam and Sensibility by Kirsten Weiss -- #Steampunk #GoldRush #ReviewTuesday

 

Steam and Sensibility by Kirsten Weiss

Misterio Press, 2014

Miss Sensibility Grey arrives in San Francisco in the earliest days of the Gold Rush to find the rattle-trap community little more than a ghost town. Pretty much every able-bodied man in the California Territories has lit out for the hills, dreaming of wealth.

Sensibility’s father, a brilliant engineer and inventor, has died, leaving her his obscurely encoded journal and a clever watch of his own design that never needs winding. Back in their home in Lima, Peru, Sensibility served as his companion and assistant while continually developing her own technical abilities. Now, alone in the world, she had no choice but to seek the protection of her uncle, whom she has never met but who is reportedly in the California Territories.

As soon as she sets foot on shore, however, she finds herself pursued by a bewildering variety of individuals, all of whom want the knowledge hidden in her father’s notebook – the key to an inexhaustible supply of energy. Miss Jane Algrave claims to be an agent of the U.S. government, while acting the part of an easily intoxicated lady of dubious virtue. Then there’s Mr. Raines, a nattily dressed gentleman who has no compunctions about throttling young women who don’t cooperate with his schemes. Enigmatic East Coast lawyer Krieg Night appears harmless enough, yet always seems to be around when Sensibility’s in danger. The imperious and elegant Marquise offers Sensibility sanctuary at her ranch, but she too seems determined to acquire the key to Professor Grey’s mysterious Aether.

A shadowy cabal called The Mark has kidnapped Sensibility’s uncle and threatens to kill him if she does not surrender her father’s secrets. Meanwhile, the deeper Sensibility delves into those secrets, the more she realizes the terrible danger the world will face if they fall into the wrong hands.

I love steampunk, both to read and to write. Hence, when my versatile blog guest Kirsten Weiss included a link to her steampunk series (as part of her cozy mystery post!), I couldn’t resist the temptation to check it out.

Steam and Sensibility’s setting is original and intriguing. I’ve read a number of tales set a few years later, when San Francisco was a male-dominated boom-town, but this book presents a different picture. It was particularly fascinating to ponder the relationship between the effectively independent California Territories and the United States of America.

Sensibility is a character with some similarities to my own young engineering prodigy, Gillian Smith. She’s clearly brilliant. For instance, she creates a humanoid automaton to clean her cabin during the voyage, just to keep herself from getting bored. However, given her skills and intelligence, I found her behavior and attitude during the first half of the book to be annoyingly passive and timid. She allows herself to be manipulated and puts up little resistance, seeming ready to give up her father’s dangerous legacy to save an uncle she’s never seen. She uses neither her considerable intellect nor her engineering skills in her struggle against The Mark and its minions.

In the second half of the novel, she comes into her own. I don’t want to spoil your enjoyment by sharing too many details, but she becomes both braver and more ingenious in her strategies. The intensity mounts, culminating in a wonderfully dramatic scene set in an old mission church – complete with a deranged villianess, killer robots and an earthquake!

Overall, this book is a lot of fun, and I’m quite tempted to buy the next volume in the series. My main hesitation is the mix of paranormal elements with the steampunk tech. Somehow magical incantations don’t mesh well with clockwork. (Indeed, Sensibility herself has similar reservations.) Still, I’m curious to see how the character develops. I certainly liked her a lot more when I finished the book then when I started.