A fantastical steampunk first contact novel that ties together high magic, high technology, and bold characters to create a story you won’t soon forget.
I was granted eARC access to Flotsam by R.J. Theodore by the publisher via NetGalley. Thank you for the approval! My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.
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About the Book
Flotsam
Peridot Shift Book One
by R.J. Theodore
Published 1 February 2022 (2nd Edition)
Robot Dinosaur Press
Genre: LGBTQIA+ Steampunk Science Fantasy
Page Count: 450
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!
Captain Talis just wants to keep her airship crew from starving, and maybe scrape up enough cash for some badly needed repairs. When an anonymous client offers a small fortune to root through a pile of atmospheric wreckage, it seems like an easy payday. The job yields an ancient ring, a forbidden secret, and a host of deadly enemies.
Now on the run from cultists with powerful allies, Talis needs to unload the ring as quickly as possible. Her desperate search for a buyer and the fallout from her discovery leads to a planetary battle between a secret society, alien forces, and even the gods themselves.
Talis and her crew have just one desperate chance to make things right before their potential big score destroys them all.
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My Review
My Rating: 3.5 Stars
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I’m a simple reader. I saw LGBTQIA+, I saw steampunk, and I clicked request! Am I disappointed? No, this book did indeed serve an LGBTQIA+ cast and rainbow-friendly environment in a steampunk setting and managed to present a strong plot and interesting characters. Would recommend, for sure!
Now here’s why I’m not as enthusiastic as I’d hoped. This book is already fairly long at 450+ pages, but it felt like 800. The overall plot is strong and interesting, but in execution it took a lot of sightseeing tangents that I didn’t sign up for. For about 50% of the book right in the middle I let the screenreader do the work reading this to me while I got mindless chores done because it wasn’t doing enough to hold my attention, but in the same way that middle grade books that are truly well done but also perfectly targeted to 10 year olds don’t hold my interest. I wish they did, I wish this did, and I can see there’s something special here, yet somehow it just didn’t click for this reader.
I also want to echo something I’ve heard a few other reviewers touch on, and that’s the fact that the focal non-binary character is the main alien. This character uses the neo pronoun xe, and I’m impressed that Kindle’s screenreaders reads it correctly, but given that this is an alien character and this character’s name isn’t actually said that often, “Xe” became this character’s name in my mind, not a pronoun. So we’ve got an alien being who’s already very socially and biologically different from the more human characters, not really expecting this character to have a familiar concept of gender, and then a pronoun that sounds like a name gets used frequently. Xe just didn’t read as NB representation to me, and I’m non-binary myself. I didn’t see my identity here; I saw a being from an entirely different species and society.
With that said, I am 1,000% here for the merger of scifi steampunk with fantasy. This universe was so interesting and so well described and I absolutely adore all of the very classically steampunk tech and occupations. This is exactly the sort of thing someone who grew up on underappreciated masterpieces like Treasure Planet craves!
Overall this book felt YA to me. I know it’s on the long side, I know the characters are adults, and I know it gets quite mature at times, but the overall feel of this book just seems like something I would have loved just that little bit more in high school. This felt like the sort of thing I would have read in 12th grade sitting up against my locker during my spare block rather than doing my homework, right after finishing an instalment of the Bartimaeus series. (Have I totally dated myself yet?)
If you like steampunk flavoured SFF and you like LGBTQIA+ casts, Flotsam is definitely worth a read!
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