“The nurse would play the moment over and over in her head, on an infinite loop that would surprise her sometimes, startling her out of a reverie or out of her sleep, for the rest of her life.
And she would listen to it, watch it, scrutinize it through the windowpane of her memory and wonder if it mattered. Surely it didn’t matter who fired the first shot, or what small event caused the action to begin. But merely knowing that it might not matter did not make it bother her any less, not at the time and certainly not in retrospect, and it did not keep that moment out of her waking nightmares.
Her terrified and very human reaction was to duck down, to dodge, to lie on the floor and pray.”
Dreadnought ~Cherie Priest
2010, Tor Books
400 pages
8/10
In her Locus award winning novel, Boneshaker, author Cherie Priest unveiled The Clockwork Century, her alternate history universe in which:
“The Civil War is still underway, drawn out by English interference, a different transportation infrastructure, and a powerful Republic of Texas that discovered oil at Spindletop some fifty years sooner than real life allowed.
The competition of war has led to technological progress and horrors unimaginable, and many people have fled the combating states, hoping for an easier life out west.”
Her steampunk-infused tale expertly wove together two alternating story lines: those of a teenage boy whose adolescent bravado and curiosity about his birth leads him into the plague-ravaged underbelly of Seattle, Washington, a city walled in to prevent both the escape of poisonous gases and the decaying post-humans who occupy its streets, and the desperate mother who will brave all for his safe return.
In her follow up novel, Dreadnought, Priest turns the focus on Mercy Lynch, a Southern nurse tending the wounded in a Richmond, VA hospital. Lynch is propelled on a cross-country journey when she is confronted with the news that her husband has died in a POW camp and that her estranged father is on his death-bed in Seattle, Washington. With a small store of cash, two pistols and the supplies in her Red Cross bag, nurse Lynch undertakes a lone journey by airship and locomotive across the very active war torn front, not knowing what, or who, she will find at journey’s end.
Though her nursing experiences have prepared her for the horrors of war, Mercy Lynch will learn that there are far worse terrors yet to be revealed.
