Charmingly Euphemistic

Really excellent, gripping steampunk flavored book.  There were a few issues - the pacing got a little slow in the middle, and too fast at the end. Some of the characters were a bit two-dimensional.  The plot was a little here and there toward the end.  But I felt pinned to my chair with breathless anticipation, and I will have to read it again soon because I know I missed some details while whipping through the pages to see what would happen next.

I am very much looking forward to this author's next book - and steampunk isn't usually a genre I really enjoy, I think because it is based on the Victorian era, and that was a dark, grim time. This book definitely captured the dark-grim.  The poor are treated like animals, upper class women are treated like pure-bred animals, justice is a laughably dim hope, everything is polluted and dirty - yeah, Victorian mood all right.

But the right writer can sell me on just about anything, and Langley Hyde is plainly the right writer.