Cherie Priest scores another hit in her rich world of an alternate 19th Century USA in which the Civil War is stretching out for decades. She creates very distinctive lead characters and then does a good job of putting them through the ringer in this short (208 pages) book, picking up the thread of a plot about escaped slave and air pirate Captain Croggin Beauregard Hainey, who had a small part in the novel [b:Boneshaker|1137215|Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century, #1)|Cherie Priest|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1270598392s/1137215.jpg|1124460]. In pursuit of him is a new character, too-famous-to-be-a-spy ex-Confederate spy Maria "Belle" Boyd, now working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency on behalf of the Union Army.

The action is kept fast and furious and fairly believable. The use of geography over mid-America is made interesting by using powered airships (she's never precise about how the engines work, propellers?) to move quickly between cities. I had a little trouble believing that landing a powered and armored dirigible anywhere within a mile of a remote building could be done with any amount of stealth. Perhaps the commonplace nature of airships in this world allow for it.

Another failing, if I may call it that, is that there is no clear antagonist in the story. Well there is one, but they are kept all too mysterious and unexplored. Upon reflection, Boneshaker could be seen to have a similar shortcoming.

In any event, the whole thing is an enjoyable and all too short romp that reminded me of one the better episodes of The Wild Wild West. Belle Boyd would certainly give James West a run for his money. ( )

Clementine is a good example of an "I_DESPERATELY_WANT_TO_BE_A_MOVIE" book.

Let me back up a bit.

Each art-form uses a different medium for a certain reason. Not all movies can be books, not all comics can be made into movies, not all poems can fit into a song, not all paintings can be interpreted as a poem. The basis of making art is finding the most appropriate medium that can help you best express and communicate your idea, story and feelings. Some mediums are affordable, like writing, and some are not, like film-making. This fact, coupled with the film and television overexposure we experience daily in our culture, has led to us usually visualizing a creative idea in our mind as a scene from a future movie. We think in moving pictures as easily as we think in words, but that "little" nudge has, at least in my opinion, proved out to be quite significant.

These two facts [the affordability of the written word and our mass media induced inclination to visualize some projects as movie exerts] usually flourish in the untrained newbie writer. This is puzzling because not only Cherie Priest isn't new to this but she has proven with her previous novel, [b:Boneshaker|1137215|Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century, #1)|Cherie Priest|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1312047238s/1137215.jpg|1124460] that she's not a bad writer either.

So what happened here? Why is this novel written like a draft of a movie script? Was Priest just bored? Why is the prose significantly worse than Boneshaker? Are these things related somehow?

Of course I have no answer. I can speculate that since Cherie Priest wanted to publish this under a different publishing house and had a word count limit, maybe decided to try something new, change the style and pace, change the feeling and mood because maybe, just maybe, she thought that this novel could be considered as a side-note addition to The Clockwork Century series and not an actual installment. A fan-fiction written by the original author, a cool draft that never really got polished, a fanzine in the clockwork universe, a book that was never meant to be taken seriously....a cop-out.

It is quite possible that I'm wrong in my speculations but I can't find another way to justify this abrupt drop in the quality of the prose and the general plot and narration of the book.

I have to say though, that it would make a kick ass action film that I would really be eager to watch [...but not read]. ( )

A good bit of steampunk, alternate history adventure. ( )

Maybe I'm just a sucker for straight-up adventure tales with airships and spies, but I think I liked this book better than the first. The first is great for giving us a feel of civil war america with mad scientists, but this one just felt snarky and full of energy. I'm now looking forward to reading the third right away and enjoying every second of it. Adventure! Ho!
( )

More of a novella at only 200 pages. Still, Priest packs a meaner punch in this work than the previous Clockwork Century novel. Hainey, the captain of the 'Free Crow', and Belle Boyd, the Southern expat spy, are colorful, fun, vivacious foils. A quick read. I rather enjoyed the mentions of characters and locales of 'Boneshaker'...if for nothing more than brand loyalty. The climax was a bit stunted, but at least Priest tidied up all the loose bits at the end (a claim which cannot be made for 'Boneshaker'). ( )