Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

Last week I finished Boneshaker by Cherie Priest. It was inspired by the underground of Seattle (created when the city raised the street level and burried the bottom stories of several buildings), which I saw a few years ago during a friend's wedding weekend.

Plot Summary: Here's the summary from the official Macmillian website ---

In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great achine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus was Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born.


But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead.

Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue’s widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history.


His quest will take him under the wall and into a city teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive.

My Reaction: This book was recommended by a friend of mine from college and I definitely appreciate the recommendation!

I have to say, though, lots of the short summaries I read talked about this being a zombie book. I didn't think that was so much the emphasis. There were definitely some "rotters" playing the role of zombies within the destroyed version of Seattle, but I thought the Blight gas, itself, was a more sinister villan. I guess I've just gotten to the point where I expect my zombie fiction to have an undead guest showing up every couple of pages (Pride & Prejudice & Zombies).

To me, this was much more a book about trying to live in the shadow of a ruined city and environmental disaster. I liked the juxtaposition of the proper (but passive-agressive and hateful) residents of the Outskirts civilization and the more straightforward (and often more friendly) pirates, looters, and saloon-keepers within the destroyed city, itself.

I liked Blair quite a bit, but kept getting annoyed at her son's lack of respect for the dangerous situations he kept wandering into. I know he's just a teenager, but serious lack of self-preservation skills for a kid who was in theory having to take care of himself while his mom worked long hours at the water purification factory.

Bottom Line: I'm a fan and will keep my eyes out for another book in this series.

Rolling Prairie Dog

Back home and doing well! You can see more Wordless Wednesday at the headquarters and my new belly pics at TexasRed and the Twins.

Teaser Tuesday - The Laughter of Dead Kings

Today is Teaser Tuesday. Teaser Tuesdays are hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

It asks us to:

(1) Grab our current reads.

(2) Let the book fall open to a random page.

(3) Share two (or three) teaser sentences from that page somewhere between lines 7 and 12 (avoiding spoilers).

We're also supposed to share the book title and author so others can find the book themselves.

So, here's my teaser for today from The Laughter of Dead Kings by Elizabeth Peters (one of her Vicky Bliss mysteries). I'm reading this for the RIP V challenge (although I'm way behind where I thought I would be at this point of the month).

"What do you think, Schmidt?"..."I think," said Schmidt, "that you are deceitful and dangerous. And even more clever than I had realized. At least you had the sense to let us in on this instead of going alone to reconnoiter."

Snaggletoothed Prairie Dog

Poor guy took another nose-dive off my shoulder this week. (They weren't kidding about PDs' lack of depth perception.)

The tooth sticking out is the broken one that's working its way out. It seems pretty tender right now, so he'll feel better when it's all the way gone.

You can see more Wordless Wednesday at the headquarters.

Teaser Tuesday - Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

Today is Teaser Tuesday. Teaser Tuesdays are hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

It asks us to:

(1) Grab our current reads.

(2) Let the book fall open to a random page.

(3) Share two (or three) teaser sentences from that page somewhere between lines 7 and 12 (avoiding spoilers).

We're also supposed to share the book title and author so others can find the book themselves.

I was THIS CLOSE to sharing a teaser from the non-fiction twins book I'm reading now, but am really trying to separate all the twin-baby-type stuff over to TexasRed and the Twins. So, here's my teaser for today from Boneshaker by Cherie Priest.

Zeke continued. "Once everyone understood about the Blight, they evacuated everything they could, right? They cleared out the hospital and even the jail, but the people stuck at the station -- the folks who'd gotten arrested, but not charged with anything yet -- they just left them there, locked up. And they couldn't get away. The Blight was coming, and everyone knew it. All those people in there, they were jsut going to die."

You can find my non-fiction twin teaser over at TexasRed and the Twins.

RIP V -- Library Loot

I'm taking part in the Readers Imbibing Peril (R.I.P.) challenge hosted by Carl over at Stainless Steel Droppings, but was having a hard time finding appropriate books. So, I hit the library at the end of last week and now have these beauties waiting in my TBR for me this month:

PD James -- The Private Patient

MC Beaton -- Death of a Valentine

Elizabeth Peters -- The Laughter of Dead Kings

A Blessing on the Moon -- RIP Challenge

Just in time for the start of October, today I'm posting my first review for the fifth annual Readers Imbibing Peril (R.I.P.) challenge hosted by Carl over at Stainless Steel Droppings.

I picked up A Blessing on the Moon by Jospeh Skibell last year (I think at the local library book sale). As with many books, I think I picked this one based on the cover (no matter the old saying, this is why graphic designers are so important). I saw that the book had been compared to a Chagall painting -- which is an interesting concept to me -- but did not realize that the book was a ghost story until I started it.

Plot Summary: This book is set in Poland during and just after World War II. We meet the main character, Chiam Skibelski just as he is being shot and thrown into a mass grave with the other Jewish residents of his small town. Chiam climbs out of the pit alone and it takes him quite awhile to realize that he is dead (although he immediately understands that his former rabbi is now personified as a crow).

Initially Chiam wanders through his town, living in his old house (which has been taken over by another family) and office (which continues to do business). He is trying to understand what has happened to his community and why he is left alone to wander, rather than moving on. We also start to hear the first references to the moon. It has apparently disappeared and the Polish Jews are being blamed. Eventually, Chiam has to wander further from home and take on new quests on his way to finding peace.

My Reaction: This was a very different take on a difficult subject. Since we are seeing the world through Chiam's point of view, even the most macabre details are told in a very matter-of-fact way. The surreal quality of the story does remind me of a painting, at times.

As we wander with Chiam, we have the opportunity to explore, from the victim's point of view, how a person can grieve for his family and community, as well as whether or not this type of tragedy can make a leader out of a regular family and business man. I think the story about the moon that threads throughout the novel is meant to address how man-made tragedies like the Holocaust affect us all -- perpetrators, victims, and future generations.

For all of those serious themes, this book is full of humor (although dark humor) and Chiam is a believable -- even likable -- character. I did feel like there were some Yiddish folktale elements that were going over my head, but even without that background, I found this book really thought provoking and I'm glad that I read it.

Bottom Line: This novel read like a dark fairy tale (think Grimm Brothers, not Disney) and is a very unique way of coping with some of the impacts of the Holocaust.