Timepiece (Albano)

3+/5. I was pleased by this book: a historical YA-ish (I don't think it's marketed as YA, but it can be thought of that way) alternate-history-time-travel-steampunk-SFF that actually seems to take some pains to get the history right. YAY. (Full disclosure: I know very little about the 1800's except through reading Austen and Dickens, so my thoughts on this should not be given the same weight as someone who does -- but my gosh, it is way better than the vast majority of YA historical-ish fic out there, which even I can tell has problems (*cough*Jennifer Donnelly, twice.) In fact, if there's any flaw in the history, it's an eagerness to show off how realistic the history is, so there's a slight bit of as-you-know-Bob that's apparent if you know a lot of about the period, but isn't if you don't. (That is to say, I noticed it in the Austenesque descriptions of titles and clothing, and not at all in the war descriptions, and I suspect it's because I have rather more literary experience with the former than the latter.) (A review on amazon notes that the French is a bit jolting for a fluent speaker, but it's clearly better than Revolution, which even this only-high-school speaker objected to.)

The book satisfied my prime requirement for a fiction book, which is that I got drawn into the story so much that I really wanted to know what happened next, and didn't get thrown out by any glaring flaws or weird prose lapses (which again, puts it way ahead of most, if not all, of the YA historical fic I've read recently). I also really loved the descriptions of Wellington; it also satisfied my prime requirement for historical fiction, which is that I want to go learn more about that period of history when I am done. Also, for a story which involves two young-adult leads, it was refreshingly free of teen romantic angst.

Caveats: The (human) characters are not particularly three-dimensional; the character that is being developed with the most care, as I've said, is the historical background, and the human characters are really in some sense only there to set off the history. Elizabeth is your stereotypical spunky tomboy too-feminist-for-her-time heroine, and she goes from spunky and naive to spunky and idealistic, which is not all that much of a character arc. William gets a little more of a character, though not a whole lot of an arc. There is a Mysterious Arc regarding Maxwell which appears to me to be totally guessable (though I guess I could be wrong). Along the same lines, there isn't much here in the way of Deep Philosophical Thoughtfulness. This may be a benefit, as it's very easy to put in Deep Philosophical Thoughts that turn out to be totally stupid (which is the case for quite a lot of YA out there), and I'd much rather not have them at all than have stupid ones, but it does put an upper limit on what the book is able to achieve.

It ends on a cliffhanger, which with its combination of triumph and despair is really just perfect, but anyway, warning to those of you who don't like cliffhanger endings. Sequel out in 2012. Hopefully the sequel will address where the timepieces came from, which is not talked about at all in this book (although one can certainly guess based on the information available).

Timepiece is still available (as of today) for 99 cents (ebook only as far as I know, but for most formats of interest -- Kindle, epub (from Smashwords), B&N), and is really a bargain, and recommended, for that price. It's not trying to do everything, and doesn't; it's just trying to be an entertaining and historically-grounded adventure, and it succeeds well in that. I shall definitely be buying the sequel.