I started describing this book to my partner as I was approaching the midpoint, running through the key details: steampunk western; Escaped slaves turned dirigible pirates; a female spy forced to become a Pinkerton because she’s too famous for the South to want her anymore; MAD SCIENCE SUPER-WEAPONS!
My partner basically asked me to stop and put it on her to-read pile before I’d finished the list.
Clementine is part of Priest’s Clockwork Century series, which started with 2009’s Steampunk Zombie Western Boneshaker and rolled through another 5 novels and two novellas. This is one of the latter, originally released as a special edition by Subterranean press and now out in paperback for everyone who wants to catch up.
As a novella, it’s not going to be for everyone. It’s definitely a long novella–I’d estimate that it runs close to 40,000 words–but it packs a lot of story, action beats, and two POV characters into that count. The result is a story that rattles along at an incredible pace, but it’s definitely one for the people who like moving fast and know the world from the prior novels.
It is, in fact, the kind of book that makes for a really interesting case study for my PhD, although I’m not entirely sure that I have the time to do it justice before the thesis is due.
Anyway, I loved this book. I’ll be going back to it and studying its techniques closer, to get a feel for how it moves at the pace it moves at, and it’s served as a good reminder of why I loved the series. It turns out that I’d completely missed the last two books in the sequence as well, so I’ve got some more to look forward to.
CLEMENTINE, CHERIE PRIEST: Amazon (AUS | UK | USA) | BOOKTOPIA
