Author: E.M. Wright
Publisher: The Parliament House
Publication Date: 18 May 2021
Pages: 215
Format: eBook - EPUB
Genre: Steampunk
Source: ARC via NetGalley
She was created for more than slavery; she was built for rebellion.
In an alternate Victorian England, clockwork cyborgs provide the primary source of labor for the upper class. Known as biomatons, they are property by law and have been manipulated and mind-controlled into subservience.
Taryn Roft, a 17-year-old girl, attending classes at Grafton's School of Mechanicks in London has a secret. What's even worse—she cannot remember anything before her twelfth birthday.
When a mysterious privateer discovers her secret, he offers her an ultimatum: accompany him to his airship, or her secret will be revealed to everyone. For Taryn, it's not much of a choice. Facing prejudice and cruelty may be nothing new to the only girl at an all-boys' school, but the further from home she gets, the darker her situation becomes.
First of all, let me share what I liked about Sedition by E.M. Wright. Taryn was a wonderful character who I was able to get behind right from the start. She is feisty and engaging and I really invested emotionally in her journey. The plot was interesting and the story moved at a good pace throughout. The book also managed to hit all the marks you would expect in a steampunk story without devolving into cliché.
On the negative side, one point I must raise, because it bugged me the most, is that the French character's French was frequently incorrect. There were issues with grammar and spelling in several sentences, and also mix-ups between informal and formal speech. He addresses Taryn both formally and informally, which doesn't make any sense. It should be consistent--either one or the other. Then, at the end he meets a character who is a) older than him b) a new acquaintance and c) in a position of authority over him... and he addresses this person informally, when each of those points on their own would require formal speech. It may seem like I am being pedantic here, but I believe that if you want to use foreign sentences in a book, they ought to be correct. Sure, readers who don't speak those languages will never know the difference, but the errors will leap off the page for anyone who does, and I found the inaccuracies highly irritating as they kept pulling me out of the story every time. I do acknowledge that I was reading an ARC, so perhaps someone will have fixed the problems with the French by now; however, it was more than just picking up one or two missed typos, which makes me think a native or fluent French speaker has not looked over those sections.
In conclusion, I am giving this book 3.5 stars. I enjoyed the story and would certainly be interested to see where Taryn's journey takes her next; however, the foreign language issues were a major sticking point for me. If not for those, I potentially would have raised this rating to a four.
I received a free eBook ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
No comments:
Post a Comment