Book Review – For Steam and Country

One nice thing about having some extra time at home is that I’m finally working through my To Read pile of books almost as fast as a new one shows up from Amazon Prime. At this rate I’ll be done with what I already have in… forty-two years. Oh dear. Perhaps I should consider a speed-reading course.

At any rate, I finally got around to reading For Steam and Country, book one in Jon Del Arroz’s Adventures of Baron Von Monocle series.

Despite being classified as a YA series, For Steam and Country is one of the rare YA novels that doesn’t insult the intelligence of its adult readers. It’s a book I’ll be perfectly happy to recommend to either of my teenage readers. In a lot of ways, it stylistically hearkens back to earlier novels – lots of action, a bit of romance, but without the need for the explicit sex and gore that often seem to be the modern hallmark of “Grown Up” fiction.

The story centers around young Zaira von Monocle, a teenage farmgirl thrust into an unexpected life of adventure when she inherits her father’s airship after his tragic demise. From there she’s swept off on an epic adventure to stop the incursions of the Wyranth army and save the Kingdom of Rislandia.

Jon Del Arroz definitely knows how to write a solid action scene. From battles with pistols and swords inside a cave, to a terrifying airship battle which reads like a cross between a duel between zeppelins and a swashbuckling pirate adventure, the book is an action-packed thrill ride. Zaira is a fantastic main character. Competent, but still with plenty of understandable, humanizing doubts about her sudden change in life.

There are currently five books in the Adventures of Baron Von Monocle series. Hopefully I can get around to reading the other four sooner rather than later.