So Gail Carriger’s Soulless is pretty fricken’ awesome, assuming a given value of awesome that roughly equals me rabidly devouring the book like the unholy mixture of crack and mind-candy it is. I’d fallen for this book so hard after the first chapter that it could have spent the remaining pages kicking puppies and forcing kittens to recite Mein Kampf in their native lolcat and I still would have loved it.
Yes, I lapse into hyperbole here, but the book deserves some hyperbole, for it is one of those novels that operates on the fundamental assumption that pure undistllled awesome will carry the day. It bypasses the critical impulses and pleads directly to the little part of the soul that’s been waiting for this book all along without ever knowing of its existence. It inspires the kind of unconditional joy that last emerged when I was sixteen and reading David Eddings.