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Book Review of The Red Plague Affair (Bannon and Clare, Bk 2)

The Red Plague Affair (Bannon and Clare, Bk 2)
Readnmachine avatar reviewed on + 1440 more book reviews


This was my first "steampunk" novel and will most certainly be the last. I found it utterly dreadful. If I hadn't been reading this for a challenge, I wouldn't have finished.

Set in a Victorian England (or Victrixian Englene, as Saintcrow would have it) populated by various magical beings, the novel takes on a horrendous plot and the attempts of the Sorceress Prime Emma Bannon and Mentath Arbhibald Clare to stop it.

The style is overwrought and the content laden with allusions to either backstory or to the first novel in this -- shudder -- series. The one good idea in the novel is the notion that the Ruling Spirit of a land (in this case, Brittania) is a living entity which inhabits the corporeal body of the current monarch, giving rise to the royal We. That's an idea I'd love to see developed. But not by this writer.