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Dec 22, 2010

Michael rated it:

``Miss Eliza Bennet, let me persuade you to follow my example, and take a turn about the room. -- I assure you the anti-gravity hoverchannel is very refreshing after sitting so long in one attitude.''

Eliza was surprised, but agreed to it immediately. She unstrapt herself from her leather seat restraints and stood, careful to maintain her balance as the airship encountered turbulence. When she entered the hoverchannel, she activated the polarity redistribution magnets within her co More...

48 comments like (115 people liked it)

Sep 03, 2011

± Colleen of the Crawling Chaos ± rated it:

(1.5)

Steampunk and zombies and mini-apocalypse, oh my. How could you go wrong?

For starters, you could have lead characters that I never really connected with or cared that much about. Protagonists whose most active role was to get themselves into the city, and then who became fortunes of fate, as things happened to them.

I did like some of the secondary characters better, especially Swakhammer. (Though it seemed weird to me that Briar called calling him Mr More...

7 comments like (35 people liked it)

Jun 19, 2010

Nancy rated it:

Dazzling inventions, air pirates, evil bad guys, underground vaults, goggles, daring rescues, gold, Blight gas, a one-armed bartender, a princess, zombies. Oh, what fun!

The setting was vividly described and rich in details. The main characters were well developed and fascinating. Briar Wilkes, widow of Leviticus Blue, eccentric inventor, searches for her teenage son, Zeke, in a walled-off section of Seattle, where a dangerous yellow gas shrouds the city, forcing the remaining inha More...

12 comments like (31 people liked it)

Sep 15, 2011

Cassy rated it:

This was my first foray into steampunk – unless Golden Compass counts. This may not be my genre. I am willing to keep going for a book or two, but the prospects are poor. And according to the clerk at the bookstore, Soulless must be my next read.

I was on the fence about reading this one. It was officially on my to-read list, but the ho-hum reviews were making me doubt the placement. Then I heard Cherie Priest was coming to a local bookstore, Murder by the Book (great name, right?) in More...

4 comments like (10 people liked it)

Sep 26, 2010

Aerin rated it:

Without a doubt this is the very best steampunk-zombie-pirate-dirigible-madscientist-subterranean-postapocalyptic adventure set in 19th-Century Seattle that I have ever read.

Basically, this book exists to answer the question: What happens when you take a bunch of disparate awesome things and cram them all together into a single book? The answer, it turns out, is this: A book with exponential levels of awesomeness! It is awesome to the nth degree! In a word (which I got from my fri More...

7 comments like (25 people liked it)

Oct 02, 2010

Brad rated it:

I dug Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, but I wanted so much more.

I dug Blighted Seattle and the Outskirts, but I wanted more detail in the former and more time in the latter.

I dug the Rotters, but I wanted more rot, more zombie madness, and more exploration of their potential ability to communicate and problem solve.

I dug the pseudo-history and Hale Quarter, the fictional biographer, but I wanted more installments of his history.

I dug the back story of More...

16 comments like (28 people liked it)

Nov 22, 2010

Stephen rated it:

2.5 stars. I liked the set up of this steampunk story and I thought the characters were well developed (especially Briar who I thought was great). That said, for some reason I did not get "hooked" on the story and found myself just getting through the book. For me, I would have liked to have learned more about the "alternate" world in which the book is set in and have the story tie into (or at least hint at) bigger issues to come. There were some nice tidbits about the large More...

2 comments like (14 people liked it)

Jan 04, 2011

Zeek rated it:

This one was, so many times, almost a dnf for me. It took the author far too long to engage the audience as her characters wandered around meeting more and more characters, all the while tryinig to find others.

But I liked the ending, and the promise of how it might end is what kept me reading.

Briar Blue has a big secret- oh not that her husband and his dreaded machine known as the Boneshaker set off an explosion that caused a blight to occur which turns people into Zombi More...

4 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 07, 2010

Stephanie rated it:

No longer a vital city, Seattle is now completely walled off to contain a poisonous gas that now seeps from the city's underground areas after a man-made disaster caused havoc to the city center. The gas, called Blight, killed thousands of Seattle's inhabitants then caused them to be resurrected as flesh-craving zombies. A giant wall was erected to contain both the zombies and the gas.

Briar Wilkes lives with her son in the Outskirts, a dreary, poisoned place on the fringes of what us More...

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Sandi rated it:

Cherie Priest has done a wonderful job with this novel. It's fun, exciting, and fun. The pacing is perfect, the dialog is good, and the exposition is well done. Priest is very good at letting the background story unfold via the characters' dialog, the action, and the setting. Even though this story has zombies, I chose to call this steampunk masterpiece science fiction rather than fantasy or horror because it is about the use and misuse of science and technology. I really had a lot of fun r More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 10, 2009

Erika rated it:

There are several really cool things about Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker: the first is the eye-catching cover; the second, that it’s steampunk; the third--only noticeable when you peek inside--is the brown- (née, sepia) colored font. Reading Boneshaker is like looking into an old Victorian photograph--the exact effect I’d want if I was writing a book to fit a genre influenced primarily by that era. This isn’t the first book I’ve read with a font color other than black (an edition of Michael Ende’ More...

9 comments like (12 people liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Sue rated it:

This book is at its heart a really fun adventure novel, taking place in post-apocalyptic Seattle and full of zombies, crazy steampunk machines, and airships.

It's Seattle during the Civil War, and inventor Leviticus Blue has just released the Boneshaker machine on the city, a drilling monstrosity that frees the Blight--a gas that turns people into zombies. Fast forward to sixteen years later, and Seattle has been walled off to prevent further spread of the gas. But Leviticus Blue's so More...

5 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 02, 2010

Scott rated it:

Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest, is my first foray into the steampunk genre and the first book I'd ever read by Priest. While I have a few gripes, I was not disappointed. Boneshaker is a fun adventure, full of zombies (in this alternate history tale they're called 'rotters'), airships, mad scientists, and flawed heroes.

Boneshaker was selected as one of Amazon's Best Books of 2009 as well as a Publisher's Weekly Best Books of 2009. It is also a Barnes & Noble November Feature Book. In ad More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 04, 2010

Krystle rated it:

Wow, this book was cool.

Zombies, steampunk, alternate history all rolled up into one? You can't get any better than that! I loved how instead of taking place Londom or Europe which all steampunk/alternate history novels do, this took place in Seattle! How awesome is that? And the history of how the zombies came about, which is not from some virus or medical experiment gone wrong, but from gas. Heh.

Instead of this being a romance, it focuses more on the relationship between a More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 25, 2010

Nikki rated it:

I'm vacillating between giving Boneshaker three and four stars. It mostly fell down for me for very, very subjective reasons -- liberal use of a trope I'm not fond of -- although there's also a bit of a problem with the pacing. In places it worked very well: beautifully tense and exciting. But after a while, the sneaking and hiding wears on you. It's like watching a movie consisting of nothing but scenes in which the characters crawl through tunnels. No matter how well-shot those scenes are, it More...

2 comments like (6 people liked it)

Mar 05, 2011

Mary Beth rated it:

This tale of an alternate Seattle, besieged by zombies(called Rotters), a mad scientist, and survivors(Doornails, as in "dead as a....") of a catastrophe orchestrated by the eponymous machine, is a fun read for the most part. I see that it is the first of a series(what is up with all of these dang series?), so maybe that explains why a lot of my questions went unanswered. It might also explain the rather quick ending, which felt sorta lazy; a bit more tidying up of loose ends would h More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 17, 2010

Dav rated it:

I almost stopped reading this book 20 pages in when I realized there was going to be zombies. It was bad enough that it was a steam punk novel, but OMG zombies? Um, the Bandwagon came by, and it wants its memes back. Steam punk (which is "what happens when goths discover brown") has been strangely annoying to me since it exploded a couple of years ago. Strange because I should be into it as I do dig the aesthetic, but I just can't enjoy it because it turned into such a mindless hipster More...

2 comments like (9 people liked it)

Nov 16, 2009

Jason rated it:

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Ah, steampunk! The very definition of a literary subgenre, steampunk tales fit not only within the general category of science-fiction (in that the storylines usually hinge on technology that has not yet been invented), but then bury this uninvented technology within a past that never was More...

1 comment like (15 people liked it)

Mar 27, 2011

Jared rated it:

You have to stand in awe of the way Cherie Priest managed to tap into the pop culture zeitgeist with her steampunk zombie pulp-fest. Anyone who thinks she was simply following these trends doesn't appreciate exactly how long it takes to get a book from idea to the shelf. It feels as if Priest was trying to write the definitive steampunk novel, with solid, logical reasons for all of the standard trappings: goggles, airships, advanced weaponry, and mad science. It will be interesting to see whe More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 28, 2010

Emmett rated it:

The epilogue captured what I really liked about this book. At the end, Priest warned against writing her to explain how she'd gotten Seattle history all wrong. She knew she's done it all wrong.

I was impressed how well she actually knew Seattle history, to the point of using a Sanborn map (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanborn_Map...) to help develop her plot. She actually took Seattle history, dumped it out on the floor and remixed it. That's wonderful.

The plot/characters More...

4 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 05, 2011

Lorena rated it:

I have to admit that rather than read it, I listened to this on Audio in my car, here and there, bits and pieces, while running errands.

I liked this book a lot more than the other book I'd recently read by the same author. The characters were deliciously quirky and multi-layered, and I liked many of them. I really wanted more of their stories, especially the secondary characters, and that makes me enjoy a book all the more. I mean, come one! A one-armed bartender?! I see the author ha More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 06, 2010

your neighborhood librarian rated it:

"That's why the best steampunk is about information - knowledge, technology, the acquisition and guarding thereof. Writers get so fetishy about their dreadnoughts and bowler hats, lavishing paragraphs and pages on descriptions of brass's "mellow gleam" under its "film of oil," and of course certain stories do work and are completely refreshed by a mere change of costume and vehicle (Stagecoach was just as good when the stagecoach was replaced by a Firefly-class spaceship More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 08, 2010

Shanon rated it:

(3.5 stars)

Boneshaker is set in an alternate Seattle in the 1880's. There's a little history (though distorted), zombies, adventure and gizmos galore. It was a good read and I will be reading more of Cherie Priest's work.

At times, I found it to be slow. I also found the little mystery to be easy to predict. There's no secret that Briar was hiding something about her husband and it's not hard to guess what it was. Instead of wondering about what her secret was I found More...

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Aug 09, 2011

Jen added it

I wanted to like this book. The premise seemed excellent, and I was drawn to Briar. Fantasy genres abound with plucky teenage heroines, but it can be difficult to find interesting adult female protagonists. Most of all, I was impressed by the glowing praise from Scott Westerfeld ("This book is made of irresistible") and Warren Ellis.

The premise is as excellent as is seemed. However, two problems plague the book.

First, a steampunk adventure story requires frequent and detailed descrip More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Feb 26, 2010

Lincoln added it

I'll lead this review off with the comment I left on Ms. Priest's blog post on the TOR website immediately after receiving Boneshaker in the mail:

"Got my copy in the mail today!! SQUEEEE! And I'm totally blowing off everything in my TBR pile after finishing the one review I've obligated myself to. SQUEEEEE!!

Oh, and before I forget...

SQUEE."

The easiest way to describe Boneshaker is to say that I read it in less than three days. I usual More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 06, 2012

Margaret rated it:

I wanted to read this novel because I enjoy Steampunk and Boneshaker comes up in almost every Steampunk discussion. The Steampunk elements are present in abundance, from airships to goggles to crazy contraptions with scary purposes, but the heart of this book is the people. Cherie Priest takes us on a wild ride through sewer tunnels and breathing tubes, places masks over our faces to keep out poisonous gases that turn the dead into rotters, zombie like creatures with incredible speed and agility More...

0 comments like

Feb 01, 2012

David rated it:

I'd heard so much about this book going in that my expectations might have been too high. It's a good book with an engaging plot and a satisfying reveal at the end. Priest throws a lot of elements into the mix. As a result, most story parts are painted in light strokes. Anyone looking for heavy doses of steampunk, zombies, or alternate history will likely be disappointed. Readers simply looking to be entertained will enjoy it. In terms of prose, Priest is an excellent writer and gave me pause se More...

0 comments like

Jan 04, 2012

Shannon rated it:

First, let me start off by saying I'm not one for zombies. At all.

However, this isn't a typical zombie story in which a hero/ine is sitting at home on a Tuesday night and ALL OF A SUDDEN ZOMBIES COME IN THROUGH THE WINDOW kind of story. They're in there, but it's not the main focus. The story revolves around Briar Wilkes-Blue and her son, Zeke.

Yes, there are zombies, and death, and shooting things, and all that fun stuff in here. I really enjoyed the strained but respectful r More...

0 comments like

Jan 01, 2012

Betsy rated it:

http://betsyda.com/randomdewey/2011/10/10/boneshaker/.
Seattle, 1879. Sixteen years earlier, Leviticus Blue created a drilling machine — Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone Shaking Drill Engine — that destroyed the business district and released Blight gas that kills you undead. Seattle had been abandoned to the Blight gas and the “rotters” behind two-hundred-foot walls. Blue’s widow and her teenage son, Zeke, now live in the poor district just outside the walls where she makes a living in the water More...

0 comments like

Dec 24, 2011

Calochortus rated it:

I'm not really sure what to think of Boneshaker by Cherie Priest -- despite the wonderful imagery and exotic-for-its-genre location, the story itself needed a bit... more. Most everything was set up really well, but there wasn't enough movement of the characters within their scenes. I read the book within a week of starting it, and it's not that short -- but I think it could have been longer. Certainly, more about Seattle could have been used -- or perhaps more interaction with the different fac More...

0 comments like