Riveted

It’s week three of November, which means it’s time for book three of The Iron Seas series: Riveted!

Okay. So, the first two book in Meljean Brook’s series, The Iron Duke and Heart of Steel, are amazing. So much action, so much steampunk, so much fantasy, appropriate levels of romance and grit and fun.

And then there’s Riveted. 

Book cover for "Riveted" as seen on amazon.com

Sigh.

I wish that was a happy “sigh”. Unfortunately, it isn’t. I really wanted to love this book as much as I loved the first two. And I love book 4, which we’ll talk about next week. I wanted to be riveted. (Ha!) But when I sat down to write this post, I had to actually look up the title of this book – I didn’t remember it, and that’s never a good sign.

Check out the official blurb and plenty of reviews on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. In summary: a girl is searching the world for her sister, who ran away from home five years ago, and she meets an odd man who is searching for his mother’s heritage.

I suppose I could elaborate. Annika comes from a secret world: a community of women who live isolated in Iceland’s harsh countryside. Centuries ago, they indirectly killed a royal man, and they have been living in secret ever since for fear of retribution and rejection by traditional society. Five years ago, Annika nearly betrayed the secret. Her sister, Kalla, took the blame and was exiled; that was five years ago. Pretty much ever since, Annika has been traveling as an employee on an airship and searching for the sister she lost.

Then a man comes on the ship: David Kentewess. He’s leading an expedition to Iceland as a geologist-of-sorts (he studies volcanoes, if I remember correctly). He is also looking for something: his mother asked him to bury something of hers in her homeland when she died, and he has no idea where that is.

David sees Annika as someone who looks similar and sounds similar to his mother. He is determined to figure out where she comes from, but she is determined to keep her village a secret. On the way to Iceland, they stumble upon a crazy person who will stop at nothing to succeed in his personal – albeit farfetched – goals. Not surprisingly, they realize that working together is necessary to save the lives of those they love. And there is lots of steampunk: people build and run machines, the women have created these giant trolls, the crazy man literally wants to tap into the steam power of the earth, etc. I’m sure there are lots of rivets involved in those things. But, was I riveted?

Ugh. I was bored just writing those paragraphs. It was a lot of . . . non action in this book. And, after the non-stop action in Heart of Steel, it was hard to slow down to this book’s pace. I never quite got the “keep-secret-or-die” mentality of the women; maybe that’s just hard to understand if you don’t spend years in that type of environment. I mean, if someone was suddenly like “don’t use sunscreen any more at the beach” and I suddenly had to deal with all sorts of sunburn, yeah, that’d probably be a hard transition.

I had a hard time routing for the characters. Annika and David seemed so painfully different that pairing them up together seemed a little awkward and boring. Even the supporting characters  – her sister, the crazy man, the other people in the expedition and the crew on the airship . . . I just didn’t relate well to any of them, and that really made it hard for me to want to read the book. The book ignores many characters in the previous books, which was disappointing.

Image result for disappointed meme

If you only read one book from this series, maybe read this one. It truly stands alone in a different world and different setting, with a completely different feel, from the other three books. And, maybe if the first two books hadn’t been quite so awesome, this book wouldn’t have felt dull by comparison.

Overall score: 5

Discussion

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