Review: Richly Characterized But Lacking In Plot
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 5, 2013
A prequel to the St. Croix Chronicles, this was my first introduction to the series, and to be forthright, I am somewhat on the fence about it. I normally enjoy this sort of story immensely, but it was missing that spark for me. That is not, however, to say this was poorly done. On the contrary, there were many aspects I enjoyed.Cherry is a vast improvement on the typical female main character as portrayed in most steampunk novels - her outlook may be a trifle anachronistic, but she is classy, intelligent and I came to like her immensely. For a novella length afternoon bit of reading, the writing here was of particular note. It was of a quality I was not expecting, and was the main element that kept me reading, as for some reason I initially had trouble getting into the story.Once it got off the ground, so to speak, things did pick up. There was no shortage of intriguing elements here, but I think the problem for me was it had less plot building than I would have liked, so while the basic story was good, the sometimes slightly excessive amounts of expatiating ended up making this more of a forced read for me.