Timepiece eBook Heather Albano
Download As PDF : Timepiece eBook Heather Albano 
A steampunk time travel adventure about a girl, a pocket watch, Frankenstein's monster, the Battle of Waterloo, and giant clockwork robots taking over London.
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Elizabeth Barton longs to escape the endless round of social ritual that defines life in the village of Hartwich during the Regency of Prince George. Her neighbor William Carrington has lost the use of his arm in the Napoleonic Wars, and now must watch from the sidelines as the final act of that conflict unfolds without him. Both go through the motions of their lives, dutiful but dissatisfied, as the Battle of Waterloo looms on the horizon. When an anonymous benefactor sends Elizabeth a pocket watch that is more than what it seems, they are swept seventy years into the future.
The London of 1885 is a steampunk dystopia where the streets are patrolled by Gatling-gun-wielding robots and the clockwork of the British Empire is slick with its subjects' blood. This future has its roots on the field of Waterloo--in the secret weapon Wellington employed there--and it will come true in seventy years' time unless Elizabeth and William find a way to stop it.
Timepiece eBook Heather Albano
I don't normally care for steampunk, but the advertised time travel and monsters drew me to set aside other books in my to-read pile to start this one first. I was glad I did. This story goes way beyond the ordinary trappings of steampunk with its imagination and close attention to historical and cultural detail and its many literary references.Don't worry if you don't know anything about 19th-century England. The characters are rich and the description is excellent, so you'll understand and enjoy the book anyway. But if you are familiar with English culture and history, you'll enjoy the references.
Albano has accomplished the seeming impossible by having the main characters be both true to their times AND relevant to today's readers. The heroine is a woman who is smothered by her family's disapproval, and the hero is a war veteran trying to adjust to normal life again and to his crippling injury. Both want to chart their own future but aren't sure how; their adventures in this book give them a step in the right direction.
The time travel and the characters' attempts to change history was also well handled. Each seeming "fix" of the future either failed or led to another bad future. The author is clearly well aware of the "butterfly effect" and also of the way multiple people create the same invention or come up with the same revolutionary idea at the same time, so there are no easy solutions for the characters and the friends they make in their adventures.
This was a book I found hard to put down, even to go to bed. I stayed up far later than I wanted to last night to finish it.
I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys fantasy or who enjoys seeing genres successfully mixed and mashed (in this case, the genres are romance, horror, steampunk, and historical fiction, with a touch of mystery).
Note: Although the book has some resolution at the end, it is not a stand-alone story. The next installment, I found out at the end, won't come out until Summer 2012. I will be impatiently awaiting that book to find out what happens next.
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Timepiece eBook Heather Albano Reviews
In 1815, a young woman receives a mysterious package in the mail that turns out to contain a time machine. She doesn't know that's what it is at first, and she and a friend accidentally jump 70 years into the future, where they find Britain overrun by monsters and robot-like war machines. They figure out that it all started at the Battle of Waterloo, and so they head there to change history.
The author clearly did a lot of research on the Battle of Waterloo, as the book is filled with historical details. (I know just enough about the battle to know that many of these details are accurate, so I'm assuming the rest are.) This historical accuracy helps keep the far-out plot grounded in reality.
The book also spends a lot of time on the life of the young noble-woman -- how she's bored with the gentrified life and fears being married off to some lazy noble whose life is even more boring. This could have been super-dull to adult male readers but it is well-enough written that it held my interest. Maybe the author's attempt to provide something of interest to the boys who want action and violence and the girls who want tea parties and romance. -)
And one side note Something that bothers me about a lot of time travel stories is how the hero travels to some far off time and place and never seems to have trouble finding food to eat and a place to sleep. I've often thought even if he brought money, surely 21st century American money is no good in 18th century China or wherever, how is he getting by day to day while he solves the great mystery or whatever? In this story there is actually some discussion of the characters struggling with such mundane concerns in between epic battles with the villains. Actually I think the author went a little overboard on some points, like going on and on about borrowed or stolen clothes not fitting properly and the heroine struggling with fashions from decades out of her time. But it was nice to see a little dose of this sort of reality in a time travel story.
I don't normally care for steampunk, but the advertised time travel and monsters drew me to set aside other books in my to-read pile to start this one first. I was glad I did. This story goes way beyond the ordinary trappings of steampunk with its imagination and close attention to historical and cultural detail and its many literary references.
Don't worry if you don't know anything about 19th-century England. The characters are rich and the description is excellent, so you'll understand and enjoy the book anyway. But if you are familiar with English culture and history, you'll enjoy the references.
Albano has accomplished the seeming impossible by having the main characters be both true to their times AND relevant to today's readers. The heroine is a woman who is smothered by her family's disapproval, and the hero is a war veteran trying to adjust to normal life again and to his crippling injury. Both want to chart their own future but aren't sure how; their adventures in this book give them a step in the right direction.
The time travel and the characters' attempts to change history was also well handled. Each seeming "fix" of the future either failed or led to another bad future. The author is clearly well aware of the "butterfly effect" and also of the way multiple people create the same invention or come up with the same revolutionary idea at the same time, so there are no easy solutions for the characters and the friends they make in their adventures.
This was a book I found hard to put down, even to go to bed. I stayed up far later than I wanted to last night to finish it.
I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys fantasy or who enjoys seeing genres successfully mixed and mashed (in this case, the genres are romance, horror, steampunk, and historical fiction, with a touch of mystery).
Note Although the book has some resolution at the end, it is not a stand-alone story. The next installment, I found out at the end, won't come out until Summer 2012. I will be impatiently awaiting that book to find out what happens next.
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