Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century series continues to surprise me. By the third book, you’d think I’d have a handle on where it’s all going. But because Priest changes characters and settings with each entry in the series, all I can say with any certainty is that the zombie problem is getting worse and that the Civil War is still lingering.
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| Ganymede |
Ganymede introduces us to Josephine Early, a New Orleans madam, who has taken on the task of getting a functioning submarine to the Union forces anchored out in the Gulf of Mexico. This book also sees the return of Andan Cly, a pirate airship captain, from the first book in the series, Boneshaker. Cly comes out to New Orleans from a very different Seattle (walled off and full of zombies) to help Josephine move her ironclad. Meanwhile, Josephine has to fight off the zombies that have turned up in her city and keep nosy Texans from getting too close to the submarine.
That’s the plot in a nutshell and there’s not much to elaborate on about this book. Most of the impact of this book, as with the previous books in there series, comes down to setting and characters. Priest’s United States is disturbingly different from our own. The Civil War has been going on for a decade longer than it really did and Texas has declared itself a republic again. As for the characters, Priest has a remarkable way of creating fully-developed characters. The strong women that each of the books center on are a delight to read about.
Ganymede is not my favorite in the series, if only because the plot threads didn’t hang together as well as they did in the previous books. But it was still a very enjoyable read and a great way to kill a few hours. And the ending it definitely worth sticking around for. I can’t say too much without giving everything away, but the end does involve torpedoes and air pirates.