Author: Jaleigh Johnson
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!
The audio book very ably read by Kim Mai Guest.
This novel is set in the land of Solace which is so ironically named as to be almost a method of torture. Every day the land is pummeled by meteor storms. The thing is that there are three oddities about these storms: they're confined to a fairly well-defined area or zone, they're accompanied by a toxic green dust, and they contain artifacts which you wouldn't normally expect to find in a meteor - such as a watch, or a music box.
Because of the reliability of the storms and the value of what they bring, a scavenging and trade culture has flourished around them. Towns have grown up - 'scrap' towns which are so lowly and unstable that they're numbered, not named - along the boundary of the storm zone, and after every meteor fall, once the evil dust has settled, the local residents, known as scrappers, charge into the area to see what they can find to sell. The faster you get in there, the more likely you are to find a 'treasure', but if you get there too soon, there's not only the dust to contend with - you might get hit by a late meteor strike.
Piper Linny (note this was an audio book, so the spellings are guesses!) is a thirteen-year-old who lost her dad to an industrial accident in the city, and is now alone, trying to eke-out a living on her wits and skills, which fortunately are significant.
Piper never had a chance to bury her father's body because she couldn't afford to have it shipped home, much less go to the city herself to attend his burial. She's poor, but she scratches out a precarious living, and she has her family home's roof over her head. She's a 'scrapper' who raids the meteor fields and trades what she recovers, but she's also a gifted mechanic (inappropriately described as a 'machinist' in the novel) who can sometimes fix-up a find before she sells it on, and thereby making far more 'coin' on it.
Piper has a close friend, the young Micah, and he's a bit too precipitous with the meteor game. One day he goes out during a storm and Piper crazily plunges out after him. This makes zero sense because Micah is only 'important' in the beginning of the novel After that, he disappears and is never heard from or mentioned again. Obviously he was only a very clumsy and amateur tool which Johnson uses to propel Piper out into a storm she would never risk otherwise.
Why does she brave the storm? Ultimately, it's in order to find Anna, not Micah. Anna is a special case and it soon becomes quite obvious 'who' and what she is. So Piper finds her as a broken girl in a wrecked traveling party, caught away from shelter when the meteor storm hit. Despite her being at death's door, it would appear, Anna recovers under Piper's evidently magic touch.
Anna is as damaged as Piper in many ways, and she becomes even more interesting when Piper discovers that she's the girl with the dragonfly tattoo, indicating to all that she's under the protection of the neighboring king. Piper realizes that Anna is her ticket out of hell - literally, since she allows the two of them free passage on the 401 - a steam engine which runs passengers and freight across the territories. With the expected reward for returning Anna safely to her family, Piper can set herself up on in the city and finally have the life of which she's long dreamed.
So far so good, but from that point on the story plummeted downhill, and while I kept wanting to like it and wanting to rate it highly for its originality and strong portrayal of the two main girls - unusual in a steam-punk, much less a YA novel, the mind-numbing tediousness of the train trip was what killed it for me - that and the fact that nothing is explained. There's no indication that this is part of a series, although I suspect it will be, yet we learn absolutely nothing whatsoever about what's going on here.
So while I willingly grant kudos for an original concept, and for two strong female characters, and I love the concept of "The 401", the male love interest for Piper was a complete bust - he was a non-entity, the villain was wishy-washy, the train ride tedious (anyone who can make a steam train ride tedious has serious issues), and the lack of resolution truly disappointing if not down-right angering. Where was the editor here? Once again Big Publishing™ = epic fail.
I don't know how old Jaleigh Johnson is, but she looks like she's fifteen, and this novel had too many of the elements of a fifteen-year-old's fanfic touch. Some of it was brilliant, but it takes more than brilliant bits to make a novel a worthy read, and this one didn't get there. I will, however, be keeping my eyes on her work for the future. If she steps away from this messed-up world and tries something different (that doesn't involve elves and fairies), I will want to read it.
