Cherie Priest is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers. After her wonderful Boneshaker, I was left wanting more. Thankfully, we have Clementine. This new book is set in the same world as Boneshaker, and readers of Boneshaker should remember Clementine, the former warcraft airship, conscripted by a former slave to aid in his piracy.
The book alternates between Croggon Beauregard Hainey, the escaped slave and current pirate, and Maria Isabella Boyd, former Confederate spy and current employee of the Pinkerton Detective Agency employed by the Union. Boyd has been sent to make sure that the Clementine makes its way to Kansas City. Hainey wants the Clementine back and will stop at nothing to get it.
Boyd and Hainey want different things and the Clementine is the crux between them. Obviously they cannot both succeed. The way that Priest handles this conflict is brilliant. This book is a straight-up spy thriller, and it’s a blast to read.
For those of you who read Boneshaker: there are no zombies in Clementine. Still, this world that Priest has crafted is exceptionally well done, and it’s easy to fall into pace with her writing and just get lost in the story. It’s an interesting counterpoint to Boneshaker, which contains all sorts of fantastical and science fictional elements. Clementine contains none of those things; it’s eerily plausible. The characters, the actions, the settings, feel so real and tangible that at times I wanted to do some research about Civil War era airships.
You needn’t have read Boneshaker to enjoy Clementine. The story stands on its own. But, if you have read Boneshaker, this new book will be like returning to a favorite restaurant for another excellent meal.
I can only hope that Priest isn’t done with this world yet. Clementine is available in a trade hardcover edition from Subterranean Press now and will be available in trade paperback next year.
John Klima is the editor of the Hugo Award winning Electric Velocipede.
You know, on one hand I really love steampunk and Priest comes up with some innovative stuff.
On the other hand, I have read Boneshaker, and I don’t know how she made a book with Airships, Zombies, and Mad Scientists so incredibly boring. The characters were flat and the plot was just a string of random encounters.
I’m rather hesitant to plunge back into one of her novels.
A pirate airship named Clementine should be commanded by a pirate queen named Clementine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Emeraldas
“Oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’
Oh my darlin’, Clementine.
Caught me stealin’, from her treasure
Blew my head off, Clementine!”
Of course I LOVE that cover and of COURSE it’s a Jon Foster cover. Jon, can you just…I don’t know…do ALL the covers for scifi and fantasy? I’d be broke from buying them, and you’d never sleep, but BOY would bookstores (and my library) be so pretty! ;)
I’m with Megaduck. Boneshaker has great ideas, but from a craft perspective, it’s just plain shoddy. Until Priest can demonstrate marked improvement in her understanding of pacing, story structure, and the way human beings actually speak and interact, I can’t see myself purchasing more of her work. More power to her, however, since none of these issues seem to be affecting her sales – or reviews.
I’m with Megaduck and Kolia.
The overwhelmingly positive, if not gushing, response to Boneshaker overlooked some fairly serious issues with the writing, plotting, world building, and characterization. I’m seeing the same kind of diction of response in this review of Clementine, which reaffirms my unwillingness to give it a try.
I just wrote a blog post about Boneshaker and the misperceptions of its quality created by the hype in reviews of it:
Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, Hype, and Taste
I suspect the same situation will occur with Clementine ….
Megaduck, Kiolia, and Mike J. I will say that I feel that Clementine is a stronger book than Boneshaker as it’s more focused in the story it’s telling. In particular, it’s the two main characters that made this story so compelling for me.
That said, I don’t expect everyone to enjoy every book I like. I mean, that would be a pretty boring world if everyone liked the same thing.
Mike J. I liked the structure of your post. I often suffer from the same issue where something is so hyped that it couldn’t possibly hope to live up to it. I invariably see/read these things (it happens more often for me with movies) and find myself disappointed with something that I suspect I would have enjoyed had I discovered on my own with the taint of expectation.
Mike that was a terrific and thoughtful blog post. I finished a Priest book recently – Not Flesh Nor Feathers – and I somewhat agree that the experience, though pleasurable and showing promise, did not live up to the vivid panegyrics splayed across its cover.
I wonder if this wasn’t ever the case, however, and the benefit now is that we simply have more people talking about the books than before. I’m reluctant to say that someone’s – if not the majority’s – experience of a novel is invalid simply because it doesn’t correlate with my own.
It’s a toughy.
@john_klima: Thanks for reading my post! Most definitely, if everyone liked and disliked the same books, SF&F would quickly become a boring world. I think the vibrancy of the many communities of readers that make up SF&F these days is exciting, as it shows the variety of tastes that SF&F serves. Whatever I might say about Boneshaker, the novel clearly found a readership by doing something that people were looking for. I suppose, as you write, that with such hype for a particular book, disappointments are bound to occur. I’m wondering, though, if we set aside taste and hype, could we talk about concrete, (nearly) objective criteria for whether or not a novel succeeds? Hmm …. For instance, from what you write of Clementine, I get the impression that Priest perhaps took a step or two forward with this novel, compared to Boneshaker?
@patrickg: Thank you for your kind words! I agree wholeheartedly with your second paragraph. In this respect, we are maybe at a rather intriguing time for SF&F: i.e., the interrelationships between authors, general readers/fans, and reviewers/critics are, in a way, so much closer (and faster) than ever before, that we all have more opportunities than ever before to know what everyone else is reading and what they think about what they’re reading. Personally, I would never want to invalidate someone’s love for a specific book (and vice versa). Yet I think asking questions about why a specific book is consistently praised so highly (or denigrated, even) is a healthy exercise — keeping away from any kind of discourse of readers being definitively “right” or “wrong” for their tastes. As you say, though, this is a tough one ….
Just finished “Clementine”. An entertaining FANTASY!
NOT SF of any sort as the laws of physics are totally ignored.
Example- A 100 metre long airship with an armoured hull only 5mm thick would have to lift ~350 tonnes of armour+cabin+crew+cargo+heavy armament!! Not unless the air density in her world is about that of water! Newton’s third law doesn’t apply either apparently, firing a Gatling gun from the hip!
I was not surprised to hear that Cherie Priest had had zombies in an earlier book. I will be asking my local library to reclassify it as fantasy, it is after all a perfectly good example of that genre. It just needs a bit of magic or other universe physics to make it right.
As a tale it was quite entertaining and well written, just NOT SF.