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Maggie Quinn, Girl reporter. Honors student, newspaper staffer, yearbook photographer. Six weeks from graduation and all she wants to do is get out of Avalon High in one piece. Fate seems to have different plans for her.

High school may be a natural breeding ground for evil, but the scent of fire and brimstone is still a little out of the ordinary. It's the distinct smell of sulfur that makes Maggie suspect that something's a bit off. And when realTwilight Zone stuff starts happening to the school's ruling clique—the athletic elite and the head cheerleader and her minions, all of whom happen to be named Jessica—Maggie realizes it's up to her to get in touch with her inner Nancy Drew and ferret out who unleashed the ancient evil before all hell breaks loose.

Maggie has always suspected that prom is the work of the devil, but it looks like her attendance will be mandatory. Sometimes a girl's got to do some pretty undesirable things if she wants to save her town from soul-crushing demons from hell and the cheerleading squad.

Я, конечно, понимаю, что в стимпанке можно писать все, что угодно, бумага все стерпит, но я так и не поняла, откуда Орда, например, нашла доисторических акул, вымерших много миллионов лет назад. Или почему говорится, что Мина похожа на отца, хотя потом выясняется, что он ей не родной? Почему мать сначала выкалывает себе глаза, только бы не видеть плод насилия, а потом вдруг проникается любовью к дочери? Что же случилось? Читатели сами должны это додумать? И т.д. и т.п., жаль не могла писать список по мере прочтения, но не было такой возможности.

The world building in this book was top notched. Confusing at first, and so, frustrating, I was really gripped by the Horde invasion, the end of the invasion and the way that the Wentworth family lived out their daily lives. Not to mention there are airships and pirate ships and krakens. Krakens! Yes please.

So that get's a 4.5.

Plot.

Interesting. I wanted to find out who was behind freezing devices and doomsday devices. Yes please! However, the ideas sometimes stumbled upon themselves due to secrecy from the reader and an assumption that the reader was well versed in the lingo. Buggers? Took me about ten pages to know what the hell that was. Bounders. I mean, I thought I knew what that was until about ten pages in. Plus, there are titles and hierarchies that are not always clearly laid out. There is a lot of information in this book crossed with relationships, world building and dialogue, I felt there was just a lot of stuff that could've been condensed and explained better. Ex. The Iron Duke. Iron or just a Duke?

That's getting a 3.5

Characters

Well well well well. It's been a really long time since I've disliked a male lead. I didn't hate him, that would have made me stop reading the book, but I had no affection for him. No sympathy and therefore I wasn't rooting for him. Maybe it's because I didn't know enough about him. I don't blame him for any of his sexual issues because it seems that both parties wanted it and he exercised poor small brain judgement. However, the only thing I felt sympathy for was the earring story and with that coming in well past 100 pages, I couldn't muster up enough to give a crap whether he got his ship or not. Yay for an under developed, bully-like, control-freak, albeit hot, male lead. Sorry, Rhys, maybe next time.

Mina. I didn't really care for her either. Repressed, on PURPOSE, stubborn and cynical - she should be the right alpha female to Rhys' alpha male. Nope. Mina as a character fell flat for me. Yes, I was inside her head for most of the book (Rhys also shares this distinction) and yes I understood her life was confusing and tough because of her blood and though I liked her better than Rhys, there was something missing. Her character was missing that very important element that made me want to root for her, to worry about her, to hope that everything went well for her. Instead I'm left with a shake of my head, wondering why she hasn't seen a therapist but not caring enough if she did. Throughout the whole book we get a glimpse of how she is perceived (Fear and Revulsion) and the best example is with her mother. When your mother gouges her own eyes out at the sight of you, I want to know more. I want to know exactly what you look like. I want to know why you've forgiven her and I want to understand the "deep" relationship you have with your parents.

Both characters fell flat, fueled by their lust or repression of it and circling each other like shy vultures. Sex shouldn't be that difficult. Trust shouldn't be that painful. If you can't trust someone, chances are you shouldn't sleep with them. If you come to realize that you love someone and you push them away, and conversely, if you let them, perhaps your issues are bigger than you think. And no, I don't care how hot the man is but if all he can ever talk about is shagging me, especially when I'm on a case or searching for a dear family member, I need to evaluate my goals.

So for me, the book was a little confusing and spearheaded by characters I didn't care for or about. I wanted to like this book but at the end it left me with a confused and sour taste. It's like going to a banquet and expecting choice food and wine only to be given a boiled cabbage and a Natty Lite.

The Iron Duke sits at the intersection of everywhere and nowhere in terms of my reading habits: it's science-fictiony, which is a genre I enjoy and read a decent amount of (I even have a dedicated book club!) and it's a romance, which I have never read at all unless you count just reading the sex scenes in books I thought might be dirty when I was about 11. Which I think we can agree is really not the same thing.

I certainly had some preconceived notions about romance books that I can't say have been proven or disproven by this one, because being an alternate-history steampunk story that is actually a rather ambitious yarn, I wager it makes an effort in terms of narrative that something like Wicked Harvest perhaps does not. That said, there are also sex scenes that are, if anything, rather raunchier than what I expected to read, forgoing polite euphemisms almost entirely (Search Results: Showing All 24 Instances of the Word "Cock"). And it still has a rippling, shirtless male chest on the cover -- thanks for the save, Kindle edition!

So first let us discuss the part of the book I liked, which was the non-romancy part: Steampunk is a genre I have a passing familiarity with, having read quite a few books often categorized that way (though like most sub-genres of sci-fi, categorization is somewhat arbitrary). It's also the hot fad right now, which is why it totally makes sense that an author who just got done cashing in on paranormal romance would give it a go. And as a genre effort, The Iron Duke is... surprisingly good. It creates a pretty interesting alternate Victorian era in which Europe has been ravaged by a mysterious force known as The Horde that has infected the populace with tiny nanomachines that allow them to be controlled via radio towers, and The Iron Duke is lauded as a hero for saving the populace from the mind control menace. There are a bunch of well imagined extraneous details that I loved, such as the fact that cats infected with nanoagents have become armored, unkillable predators, and also there are steel sharks and giant kraken (!).

This is all absolutely ridiculous, of course, but steampunk almost always is -- I haven't read one book yet that truly justified how such advanced technology could be invented so long ago with just a few tweaks of the timeline (did you know if Abe Lincoln hadn't been assassinated, for example, by 1900 the U.S. army would have defeated Mexico with the aid of robotic exoskeletons? It's true, look it up). The important part is that it is fun to read about, and the book does a pretty good job of sketching this world without going into exhaustive and unnecessary detail (which might have resulted in me not entirely understanding the plot, but based on other reviews, that was my fault). And it actually has a well-developed (not like that!) (No, really, not like that, we are told) and interesting female protagonist for the most part. Police inspector Mina is strong-willed and opinionated and unwilling to sit back and act pretty in proper Victorian fashion, and she is a lot more fun to read about than the bland heroine of Boneshaker, which was one of the most-celebrated sci-fi novels of 2009 that I happened to find very nearly terrible. She's investigating a murder that will come to involve politics the world over, as well as, of course, The Iron Duke!

Because yes, it is also, unfortunately, a romance novel, and why? The answer seems to be that romance is the kind of book the author can sell, because she doesn't seem particularly into creating a nuanced relationship between Mina and the Duke (who has a name but it totally doesn't matter). Because while Mina operates in an interesting political and social sphere, where we can see how the influence of Horde control has changed the ways traditional gender roles are perceived, with many women freely allowed to be badass and promiscuous without anyone batting an eyelash, the attraction between the leads is rote and unmotivated and totally uninteresting, like instantly HE MUST HAVE HER and even though she wants to resist, the Duke just makes her feel all HOT DOWN THERE and this goes on for pages and pages, often stopping the very interesting thriller/murder mystery plot cold.

At first the purple prose is just annoying ("No armor. No buckles. Only a few layers of cotton and ten feet of parlor separated his mouth from her breasts."), but then the sexytimes really kick in and the author just starts cutting and pasting and rearranging stock phrases like "rigid" and "lips" and "wet" and "suck" and "arching" and calling them sex scenes, and they aren't particularly interesting. I couldn't stop thinking of "I put on my robe and wizard's hat", which if you have not read you really must go and read RIGHT NOW (and then go read all of these).

I mean, this: "Her musky scent threatened to drive him out of his mind, more heady than any perfume, any wine." Or this: "You inspired me... You didn't have to fight when you destroyed the Horde. So I decided to make your tower explode." Or, god, this one: "His heavy sac (?) buffeted (!?) her clitoris with each annihilating (!?!) stroke." I mean, come on, get back to the giant squid attack.

And I haven't even touched all the really odd gender dynamics at play, and the way Mina is independent but really appears to want to be dominated and the Duke is a caring dude but also pretty much a rapist by the end (and he is doing it for her own good question mark?). Ceridwen's review made an interesting point about how Mina is trying to come to terms with a past sexual violation through her experiences with the Duke (the Horde used to use their tower to whip the populace into sex Frenzies so they would produce more worker bees), and that aspect makes their interactions a bit more compelling, but I don't think it is developed consistently enough to be interesting rather than just... off-putting (unless you like to read about rape). I know some people who have been sexually abused can certainly become aroused in recreating those situations through sex play (thanks for the info, Dan Savage's Savage Lovecast!), but it didn't quite work for me here. I needed more of Mina than her lame internal struggles if I'm going to give the book that much credit.

Um, so this is getting pretty long. I will say that for my first romance, it was A LOT better than I was expecting it to be, and I think toning down the explicit sex, reducing the emphasis on the myopic leads' hormones and beefing up the sci-fi elements a bit more could have made this an excellent genre entry. Instead it's a weird hybrid, but a pretty good read.

Search Results: Showing All 13 Instances of the Word "Rigid"