The Mechanical: Book One of the Alchemy Wars

I have this guilty feeling like I should apologize for not really liking this book very much. But I feel like the last hours of making my way through this book have truly been an effort, trudging my way along only to realize I need to do the same with at very least the next book - and possibly the one after that as well - to clarify so many open points. However, I lack the interest in this story to continue. It's just not my taste. Don't get me wrong: The author's writing is quite good and the vocabulary even intellectually luminous in places. I wasn't put off by the latter even though I found myself repeatedly looking up words that I only had a vague clue as to their meaning out of context. However, the first third, even first half of the book drags tremendously. Ye gods, the REAL French royals were dreadful enough, but Tregillis has somehow managed to make them even less humane than the recent over-emotive reenactments seen on TV (the gods awful 'Versaille' springs to mind). I am definitely NOT a fan of historical fiction and even in this re-imagined world, I found it particularly distasteful dealing with the 'royals' and/or elite persons depicted. In addition, my own leanings left me feeling outright nauseous to see that a world like this would not have overcome the unenlightened battles between Protestant and Catholic beliefs in all their revealed vulgarities. Instead, these are even heightened to a point where any hope for humanity seems to disappear from one page to the next. There is simply no human with whom I could really sympathize - including even a zombified priest who suffered greatly for his eventual misdeeds - and found the symbiotic characters only slightly more interesting. But hey, if the thought of combining 'The Bicentennial Man' with 'A Tale of Two Cities' sounds like your kind of thing, then by all means, tally ho! For me a solid, unrounded 2 star rating is more than generous.

He's probably my most looked-forward-to author right now, and this book is as good as anything he's written. Looking forward to the next in the series!