Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

5 stars -- I love this book!

So... my husband grabbed this off the library shelf (with several others I haven't read yet) and said, "I got these for you. I think you'll like them." So I read the back-ad/flap copy and took them home. And I'm glad I did!

Boneshaker (an adult book, imagine that) is a steampunk zombie book that takes place in late-1800's Seattle, Washington. But because I'm in the American midwest, I don't know the history of Seattle, and I could have believed that the book takes place in a re-imagined modern-day Seattle. After all, steampunk necessitates change in many modern conveniences... and there wasn't very much of the Victorian element in the book at all.

In the late-1800s, the Russians want to find gold in Alaska and they pay a brilliant scientist for his invention, the Boneshaker. The scientist, Levi Blue, builds it and then takes it for "a test run" under Seattle (although there are various theories about what the "test run" really was). The Boneshaker just "happens" to go underneath Seattle's financial district, which causes a lot of chaos in and of itself, but it also opens up a gas leak. The gas, hypothesized to come from Mount Ranier and called the Blight, makes people sick. And sometimes the people turn into zombies if they don't die from the Blight.

So downtown Seattle is walled in to contain the gas, and the people are evacuated to the Outskirts.

Our story begins 15 years later when Levi's widow and son re-enter the walled-in district. A small group of people have decided to live within the walls, and it is these people that both help and hinder our two main characters. They meet the Chinese, whose presence in the area is never really explained, although they are the ones who pump in fresh air; the mad scientist Minnericht, who may or may not be Levi and who has set himself up as the king of the walled-in area, and many of his cohorts; and a variety of people referred to as "Doornails" who choose to live there for no particular reason but are now in perpetual debt to Minnericht. They also meet several airship captains (pirates!) who dip in and out of the walled-in area but don't live there.

Zeke, the son, enters the district so that he can clear both his father and his grandfather's name (his grandfather, Maynard Wilkes, died due to the Blight while freeing prisoners initially left to die in their jail cells. Some people view Maynard as a hero... some don't), and Briar, our main character, comes after to find and save him.

As is wont to happen, Zeke falls into the wrong hands, and Briar falls into all the right ones.

I really, really liked this story. I couldn't put the book down and finished it in less than a day. I loved the zombies, but the book isn't so zombie-heavy as to make it seem like "just another zombie book." The steampunk comes out heavily in crazily awesome inventions, with new ones popping up all the time. Plus(this is huge for me!), a majority of the story revolves around whether Minnericht is or is not Levi Blue, and despite the fact that a majority of the story is told from Briar's POV and she appears to know the truth, the reader isn't privvy as to whether Minnericht is or is not Levi Blue until the very end.

The author did a fantastic job of keeping the who's, why's, and how's hidden without hindering the story. A lot of the time, a plot like this gets to be, "Will you just tell me already?!" or "I already know what you keep trying to hide," but in this story, neither of those things happened.

This is a fantastic sci-fi book, and if you have any interest in steampunk, zombies, Seattle, good action stories, etc., I think you should read this. It's even worth the half-day you lose trying to finish it :) Plus, the type is a reddish-brown, and I adore different-colored fonts.