Unusual vampire/werewolf novel - old fashioned writing style. Did not realize when I read this it could classify as steampunk. The 2 star rating refers to the writing style with which I had a difficult time. ( )

Seven for a Secret by Elizabeth Bear. I rated it it 3 1/2 stars. This was the second book in the series featuring Vampire, Sebastian, and his court. This book took place about 40 years later. They are in London, which is being occupied by Nazi Germany in this alternative history. It was OK. I didn't find the story as fleshed out and complete as the first one. It felt like the beginning of a story instead of a complete story like the first one. I will have to read the third novella in the series to see if it is more of a continuation of this one. ( )

This novella brings back the characters from the stories of New Amsterdam 40 years later (1938). I liked the portrayal of the vampire caring for his aging companions and the description of how his identities and memories flow away from him over the years. It's an odd parallel magic-using world where the Prussians have successfully invaded Britain in the late 20s. The story swings from the vampire to the story of two girls training to be bodyguards to the Chancellor in a very creepy way... I was happy to see a reference to the vampire's knitting habit. ( )

The sequel to [b:New Amsterdam|185636|New Amsterdam|Elizabeth Bear|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172527399s/185636.jpg|2443812], although it says so nowhere in the book. I read this without having read its predecessor (dear publishers: PLEASE label sequels), but I got a handle on the characters, their relationships, and the world pretty quickly. I like this best of everything I've read by Bear. It's significantly less hackneyed than her short stories. The dialog is still a little off, but the world building is quite good. Bear also has a talent for likable characters; this world is populated by several, not least Ruth Gell, one of the Prussian army's Sturmwolves.

Years after [b:New Amsterdam|185636|New Amsterdam|Elizabeth Bear|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172527399s/185636.jpg|2443812], wampyr Sebastian and his elderly scholarly friends Phoebe and Abigail return to England. But it is not an England as we know it--the presence of magic has changed history. America is only just becoming a nation, and England has fallen to the Nazis. English schoolchildren are taught to Prussian values. Among those schoolchildren is Ruth, a pretty teenager with two secrets: one, she is Jewish and two, she is desperately in love with her schoolmate Adele. Less secret is this: Ruth, like her classmates, is being turned into a werewolf. Can our heroes save the children from becoming Nazi weapons--especially since the children don't want to be saved? ( )

Rating: 4.3* of five

The Book Description: The sequel to New Amsterdam!

The wampyr has walked the dark streets of the world's great cities for a thousand years. In that time, he has worn out many names--and even more compatriots.

Now, so that one of those companions may die where she once lived, he has come again to the City of London. In 1938, where the ghosts of centuries of war haunt rain-grey streets and the Prussian Chancellor's army of occupation rules with an iron hand.

Here he will meet his own ghosts, the remembrances of loves mortal--and immortal. And here he will face the Chancellor's secret weapon: a human child. .

My Review: Stories and novellas! Stories and novellas!! What is this Bear woman DOING to me?! WRITE A DAMN NOVEL ABOUT THE WAMPYR ALREADY!

Ahem.

I liked the story collection that introduced us to Don Sebastien de Ulloa. I thought it was an interesting alternative to our own history, and liked the characters quite a bit. Bear killed off one of my favorites, but heck, I still read Louise Penny books and she did worse than kill off one of my favorites.

Forensic sorceress Lady Abigail Irene is back, but not for much longer. She's almost 90, and she's not immortal. Don Sebastien, now Dr. James Chaisty, is of course accustomed to his human favorites growing old and dying. He's not happy about it, but he's not unhappy either. He has perspective, that of millennia of life, and he has the mental and emotional flexibility to reinvent himself with new times and new people.

Abby Irene isn't kidding herself, she knows what time it is; she's leaving soon, but she wants to finish a few things she felt she did badly. She reflects on her life in the context of solving the problem of what to do about the Prussians' nascent army of werewolves...which turns out to be a damned sight tougher than she or the wampyr thought it would be.

We're introduced to a variety of characters, which in a 128-page novella isn't always good, since we spend little time with any of them. Still, Bear is a past mistress of the few-deft-strokes characterization technique, so one doesn't feel slighted so much as shorted...MORE PLEASE.

One fact that has vanished from this book is annoying in its convenient absence: Don Sebastien was Europe's great detective in the collection and now he's living in a city occupied by an anal-retentive authoritarian bunch of Germans and he's not recognized.

Uh huh.

A sentence or two about keeping one's head down, assuming an identity already in place, something, would have fixed it. And how he's passing for human, if he is, is beyond me. Well, it is a novella not a novel (which it could easily have been), so one doesn't always get the fullest development of ideas.

And it's Elizabeth Bear. That means it's good writing. It's set in London, so there's a good bit about rain and cold, which made me shiver. And Abby Irene has a conversation with her thousand-year-old lover about growing old and leaving memories, which made me mist over...until the wampyr says, “Twenty years or eighty, you're all ephemera to me.”

Cold and rain have not one thing on the bleak solitariness of that statement for chill factor.

It need not be read after New Amsterdam to be fully appreciated, but I do think it's worth a place in your TBRs. Short, strong, and good. ( )