Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

About the author: Cherie Priest wrote the Eden Moore series of Southern Gothic ghost stories and lives in Seattle, Washington. She also maintains a blog

Grade: B

This is an adventure story told from the varying point of views of a mother and son. The son, Zeke, goes into a walled in city of toxic gas, zombies, and dangerous people to learn more about his scientist father. The mother, Briar, goes in after him to save him. Both wander through the city (a post-apocalyptic 1800’s Seattle) encountering the many dangers while making some new friends.

At a thick 414 pages, you would think the story would be pretty complex. It isn’t. It’s really a pretty basic story about a mother and son trying to survive a dangerous world and make it out alive. Any questions the reader has are answered in a couple pages at the very end, a quick wrap up, and then it’s over.

This is the first “steampunk” novel I have read, and it’s not as out there as I anticipated. Priest alters history for her own purposes, moving events like the civil war and the invention of electricty around to suit her purposes, which is no problem in my opinion. Fiction is fiction, do what you need to.

I did however have two serious problems with the novel’s set up. Zeke’s father, Dr. Blue, created a machine that dug through the earth underneath banks to steal money. In so doing, a toxic gas was released from the earth and oozed up into the city, killing people and turning some into zombies. This all works for me. What doesn’t work for me is that in order to contain the ooze the people build a high wall around the city to hold the gas inside.

My question is this: why didn’t they just fill in the holes the gas was oozing out of? Seems like an easier task than building a really high wall all around Seattle.

Another issue I had was that some people choose to live within the toxic zombie city, and their safe holds are tunnels underground where they are safe to remove their gas masks and breathe easily. Underground. Where the toxic gas is oozing from. This doesn’t make any sense to me, either.

Priest doesn’t bother to even give a half-ass reason for these plot holes.

That aside, it was an enjoyable novel but not something I would give a shining recommendation for. It was well written, smooth transitions and it was an interesting change of pace to have the p.o.v switch between mother and son because you never really knew exactly where in time either character was. One moment the son is talking to a character we as readers know the mother has met, but did she meet them already in the son’s timeframe? Zeke, we know, has been inside the city longer than the mother, but it’s difficult to know how quickly she is catching up to him in the story.

The minor characters are decent, though I feel like they could have been more interesting and maybe had more of a role in the story. One of them, a woman with only one mechanical arm, becomes close with Briar but isn’t developed as much as she could have been. Same thing goes for a Native American woman called “the princess”.

Generally this novel was just alright. A warning to zombie novel lovers: it’s not really a zombie novel. Zombies play a role but they function as background scenery more than anything else.