I can’t believe I actually finished this book. The plot was so preposterous that I should have stopped reading it and went and found something better. But I finished Ekaterina Sedia’s Heart of Iron anyway, most likely because her other book, The Secret History of Moscow, was so good. But Heart of Iron actually got worse the further into it I got.
Heart of Iron has a promising start. Our heroine, Sasha Trubetskaya, lives in an alternate Russia where the Decembrist Revolution succeeded and the serfs were freed. Engineering and science are on the rise, leading to an early technological revolution as well. Sasha is a lighthearted girl for the first few chapters, but when she gets the opportunity to go to university she seizes it with both hands. She makes friends with Chinese students and a mysterious English student. So far, so good–except that the plot makes a left turn at this point and starts heading into WTF territory.
The Chinese students start disappearing. I could go along with that. What I couldn’t go along with was Sasha’s self-appointed diplomatic mission to China with her English friend, Jack, in tow. For some reason, Sasha thinks that if she can arrange an alliance between China and Russia, her friends will be released from prison. Sasha never questions why her mission might fail. It never occurs to her that as the daughter of a minor noble who has only just made her social debut she has zero political clout. It’s fun to watch her disguise herself as a hussar and travel across Russia by train and airship, but there was always the question in my mind about who would listen to her if she actually made it to her destination. Not only that, but in any reasonable book, Sasha would run a fair risk of getting killed because Sedia decided to complicate matters by sending her heroine right into the middle of the Taiping Rebellion. It’s just absurdity piled onto absurdity at this point. I couldn’t even enjoy the steampunk elements because I was having too much trouble suspending my disbelief about everything else.
I don’t often say it, but I can’t think of anyone who could really enjoy this book.