Rating: WARTY!
I like the idea of steampunk as a genre, but I seem to have had little success with that genre from what I've so far subjected myself to, and this audio book was no exception to that pattern. I could not get into it and DNF'd it before long. It did not help that this was the first in a series (An Elemental Web Tale), and I'm not much into series. The first volume is always a prologue and prologues and me definitely do not get along.
In this story, Doctor Piyali Mukherji, a recruit to an organization called "The Queen's Agents." I like a good Indian woman in a story and have enjoyed such stories in other genres. I'm in a sort of delayed process of gearing up to write one of my own, but in the case of this particular novel, I could not get up any head of steam, and I found myself caring less and less what she was up to, because it just seemed so rambling and uninviting. It went on and on and I couldn't focus on it at all. It was a bit weird frankly.
Her investigation was in Wales, which is also something I'm interested in normally. I love the Welsh accent and have visited wales myself more than once, but again, in this case, it failed to stir me. This 'reuniting' of Doctor Mukherji with an old flame, Evan Tredegar, and the kindling of past and alienated desires I could have done without. It's a tired trope and it offered nothing new.
The real question though is how was this steampunk? It was really an epidemiological study with nothing steampunk about it. It could have been any genre, so there was that strike against it, too. Maybe steampunk played a larger part in the story later, but I couldn't stand to read that far, having had my interest badly squandered by the uninspired writing.
So there's the real problem in a nut's hell: it (at least theoretically) has steampunk; it has a potentially strong Indian woman as a main character, and it was set in Wales, and yet this could not hold my interest! I can only conclude that the problem was not me, but poor writing which failed to engage me, and misrepresentation by the author and or the publisher as to what this book was really about, and what it had to offer the reader. I can't commend this based on what I read.
