Meljean Brook

The writer bit off more than she can chew with this one, with the worldbuilding specifically. Chapter one and the info dumping gets way out of hand. There is so much stuff that I think we didn't need to know and knowing it at this point is clumsy and confusing. When you are world building, and especially when you are creating alternative history, it is easier for the divergent point to be relatively recent in comparison to the time the actual story takes place. The divergent point in this story seems to have happened sometime in the eighteenth century, but it is clearly happening during the Victorian Era because it is steampunk, and it is hard to place the world in relation to our own. It has the aesthetics of Victorian Britain (Edwardian??), but none of the history that makes it Victorian Britain, and importing the aesthetics without the history is iffy. I think that this is a line all steampunk must toe, but this one is particularly egregious because none of the history is there. Britain isn't the empire it was in our world, the Mongol Horde is that. Fine, that's ...loaded, but fine. The thirteen colonies don't exist and the Europeans have split the Americas between them. There is a whole thing about sugar, and this is kind of what stood out and annoyed me because if the thirteen colonies aren't a thing, triangular trade and the Columbian Exchange doesn't exist. You have given me all of this information so I wonder about other things in the first chapter that have nothing to do with the plot like: where is Africa in all of this? There seems to be some erasure going on to maintain this Mongol Horde thing, like the fact that enhanced steampunk people are called zombies (zum bi) according to the Horde, but the concept of zombies in our world are an Afro-Caribbean concept from Voodoo, Obeah, and other Afro Caribbean religions, which are divergent from West African religions because of slavery and triangular trade, sugar being one of the primary exports. There is also the fact that enhanced steampunk people are referred to as being buggered and bounders (another confusing addition), and that means something completely different to British people, and I was like the author must know this, so why this choice? There is a whole backstory that is given about the love interest before we meet him, and he's lead an interesting life, but it would be nice if that had been told naturally to another character instead of being info dumped. All of this information raises the question of why the story starts where it starts because there is all this other stuff that the author is telling us to care about that happened before and I'm like why didn't you just tell that story? My point is the world building is clumsy, and the author clearly thought a lot about it, but I can see the entire iceberg. She should have gone the high fantasy route (because it is similar in scope) and put all this information in a prologue with the requisite appendices and glossary that a self-respecting reader could have skipped.
It is also social justice-y in some very cringey ways, which I can only assume is piggy-backing of of soulless, which does it better. Like there are some nods to how colonialism is bad (and its like,sure, I guess its easier to condemn when white people are the victims), and the main character experiences racism and gets called a lot of racial slurs(I wish writers wouldn't do this because racism manifests itself more subtly) and the obstacle to the two mains being together is partly racism. But then there are plot points like: the Horde mind controlled her mother, raped her, and then gouged her eyes out when she saw she gave birth to the main character and all of England knows this. This plot point is fine from a dramatic perspective (even though it is somewhat triggering) but the real world implications of depicting nonwhite people as raping, pillaging, colonizing murderers of white people, when that doesn't reflect reality at all, is a huge yikes from me.Especially when the Horde is clearly a stand in for Western anxieties about our own waning empire and the rise in power in countries such as china. And they have enslaved Hindustani people, and the love interest is pulling a white savior and discouraging that because he was a slave. Remember how I was wondering where Africa was in all this? Well, apparently it was still colonized and slavery was still a thing, so the author can stretch her imagination only so far on some things. But don't focus too hard on that. Instead focus on the white slavery, which god I wish these white people would stop writing about. Yes, white slavery was a thing that actually happened in history, but it wasn't like chattel slavery, and mentioning it without fully explaining it is irresponsible because people will inevitably point to it and say "see, white people were slaves too," and its like no these two things are not the same at all. Having the main character be Mongolian isn't enough because she isn't Mongolian culturally, and there is no empathy here. They are depicted one-dimensionally as otherized and villainous and they are an actual nationality/ethnic group that exists in real life.
I did like the characterization and the main two characters relationship. I liked the romance. As the book went on it revealed more information about the world organically instead of what they did in chapter one, which I think just needed an editor. Its just that these problematic aspects really made me think about why having a sensitivity reader is kind of important.… (lisätietoja)

This had a surprisingly engaging steampunk backdrop with a much more complex plot than I expected.
The steampunk worldbuilding is very wishy-washy and vague and technically it's more like electropunk if you want to be pedantic but it managed to capture the steampunk atmosphere and feeling very well nonetheless which is what steampunk is really about imo.
The plot starts out simple enough but gets increasingly convoluted and at the same time the angsty romance takes over more and more of the plot and the final resolution is half-assed at best and renders most of all that convoluted plot irrelevant. In the end, all that plot complexity was mostly a plot device to drive the romance and is ultimately not at all relevant to the story.
The romance itself is very much in your face clichéed without any attempt at subtlety.
The sex goes from pretty hot to (apparently not) very painful. Surprise dry ramming and all that... (Was this really written by a woman?)

One thing that kept confusing and annoying me is that the author uses 2 or sometimes even 3 names for characters and never sticks with one of them either, constantly switching between them. I think it was supposed to help characterization because certain people called others by certain names but it just made things much more confusing than it needed to be.

Oh, and the ending is so incredibly cheesy I felt like my ears would start to bleed any second.

I enjoyed it more than I expected but the romance took over too much of the book especially in the last part while neglecting too many dangling plot threads all over the place.… (lisätietoja)

The writer bit off more than she can chew with this one, with the worldbuilding specifically. Chapter one and the info dumping gets way out of hand. There is so much stuff that I think we didn't need to know and knowing it at this point is clumsy and confusing. When you are world building, and especially when you are creating alternative history, it is easier for the divergent point to be relatively recent in comparison to the time the actual story takes place. The divergent point in this story seems to have happened sometime in the eighteenth century, but it is clearly happening during the Victorian Era because it is steampunk, and it is hard to place the world in relation to our own. It has the aesthetics of Victorian Britain (Edwardian??), but none of the history that makes it Victorian Britain, and importing the aesthetics without the history is iffy. I think that this is a line all steampunk must toe, but this one is particularly egregious because none of the history is there. Britain isn't the empire it was in our world, the Mongol Horde is that. Fine, that's ...loaded, but fine. The thirteen colonies don't exist and the Europeans have split the Americas between them. There is a whole thing about sugar, and this is kind of what stood out and annoyed me because if the thirteen colonies aren't a thing, triangular trade and the Columbian Exchange doesn't exist. You have given me all of this information so I wonder about other things in the first chapter that have nothing to do with the plot like: where is Africa in all of this? There seems to be some erasure going on to maintain this Mongol Horde thing, like the fact that enhanced steampunk people are called zombies (zum bi) according to the Horde, but the concept of zombies in our world are an Afro-Caribbean concept from Voodoo, Obeah, and other Afro Caribbean religions, which are divergent from West African religions because of slavery and triangular trade, sugar being one of the primary exports. There is also the fact that enhanced steampunk people are referred to as being buggered and bounders (another confusing addition), and that means something completely different to British people, and I was like the author must know this, so why this choice? There is a whole backstory that is given about the love interest before we meet him, and he's lead an interesting life, but it would be nice if that had been told naturally to another character instead of being info dumped. All of this information raises the question of why the story starts where it starts because there is all this other stuff that the author is telling us to care about that happened before and I'm like why didn't you just tell that story? My point is the world building is clumsy, and the author clearly thought a lot about it, but I can see the entire iceberg. She should have gone the high fantasy route (because it is similar in scope) and put all this information in a prologue with the requisite appendices and glossary that a self-respecting reader could have skipped.
It is also social justice-y in some very cringey ways, which I can only assume is piggy-backing of of soulless, which does it better. Like there are some nods to how colonialism is bad (and its like,sure, I guess its easier to condemn when white people are the victims), and the main character experiences racism and gets called a lot of racial slurs(I wish writers wouldn't do this because racism manifests itself more subtly) and the obstacle to the two mains being together is partly racism. But then there are plot points like: the Horde mind controlled her mother, raped her, and then gouged her eyes out when she saw she gave birth to the main character and all of England knows this. This plot point is fine from a dramatic perspective (even though it is somewhat triggering) but the real world implications of depicting nonwhite people as raping, pillaging, colonizing murderers of white people, when that doesn't reflect reality at all, is a huge yikes from me.Especially when the Horde is clearly a stand in for Western anxieties about our own waning empire and the rise in power in countries such as china. And they have enslaved Hindustani people, and the love interest is pulling a white savior and discouraging that because he was a slave. Remember how I was wondering where Africa was in all this? Well, apparently it was still colonized and slavery was still a thing, so the author can stretch her imagination only so far on some things. But don't focus too hard on that. Instead focus on the white slavery, which god I wish these white people would stop writing about. Yes, white slavery was a thing that actually happened in history, but it wasn't like chattel slavery, and mentioning it without fully explaining it is irresponsible because people will inevitably point to it and say "see, white people were slaves too," and its like no these two things are not the same at all. Having the main character be Mongolian isn't enough because she isn't Mongolian culturally, and there is no empathy here. They are depicted one-dimensionally as otherized and villainous and they are an actual nationality/ethnic group that exists in real life.
I did like the characterization and the main two characters relationship. I liked the romance. As the book went on it revealed more information about the world organically instead of what they did in chapter one, which I think just needed an editor. Its just that these problematic aspects really made me think about why having a sensitivity reader is kind of important.… (lisätietoja)