gnashchick's review against another edition
4.0
Finished Breath of Earth by Beth Cato. It was a ton of fun to read and the characters were delightful. Geomancers! Selkies! Hidden Ones! Airships and clockworks, war and danger, near misses, bad guys, and total chaos. There's even a sweet romance with a touch of steam and I don't mean the airships. Cato added an addendum to the book with a brief breakdown between the actual SF earthquake and the fictional SF earthquake of the book. She kept many details of the historical disaster--little things like the opera our heroes attended before the quake--and when it came to the fantastical, she poured magic over everything. That was a nice addition, and I appreciated the amount of work that went into the novel.
Super glad that I have book two already because I want to hang out with all these wonderful characters for a bit longer, and meet some new ones.
Super glad that I have book two already because I want to hang out with all these wonderful characters for a bit longer, and meet some new ones.
kblincoln's review against another edition
5.0
Dirigibles, alternate-San Francisco, giant hidden geomantic fantastics, and a lovely little romance between an engineer and a girl who is realizing the secret power she's kept hidden all this time is going to matter as San francisco is attacked and all the people she's ever known are torn away.
Ingrid has grown up with her Japanese "uncle" in a house of geomancers- men who can siphon energy from the earth and expell it into stones that act like batteries. There are difficult relations in this alternate San Francisco-- the Japanese and the U.S. have allied and Chinese in the U.S. are suffering as a result. This complicated set of racial relations is a solid basis for the story that I think sets it apart from your usual steampunkery adventure.
Ingrid and her new allies survive the fall of San Francisco, only to go after the culprits who initiated it. It's pretty much non-stop action. The scene that is sticking with me is Ingrid and her love interest, Cy, surviving a mad stampede of cattle. Very gory, quite startling.
I'll definitely be following Ingrid into her next adventure-- which I hear is in Portland! (it's like this book was made for me.)
Ingrid has grown up with her Japanese "uncle" in a house of geomancers- men who can siphon energy from the earth and expell it into stones that act like batteries. There are difficult relations in this alternate San Francisco-- the Japanese and the U.S. have allied and Chinese in the U.S. are suffering as a result. This complicated set of racial relations is a solid basis for the story that I think sets it apart from your usual steampunkery adventure.
Ingrid and her new allies survive the fall of San Francisco, only to go after the culprits who initiated it. It's pretty much non-stop action. The scene that is sticking with me is Ingrid and her love interest, Cy, surviving a mad stampede of cattle. Very gory, quite startling.
I'll definitely be following Ingrid into her next adventure-- which I hear is in Portland! (it's like this book was made for me.)
mountaingirl88's review against another edition
1.0
DNF at page 98. The story seemed interesting in the beginning, but now I'm bored. The pacing is too slow for my liking, and the main character is kind of all over the place with weird and unexplained abilities she's just discovering and mooning over a dude she literally just met.
rachelini's review against another edition
4.0
I loved the alt-history world that was created here and the development of the story. The romance felt a bit like an afterthought.
selemei's review against another edition
5.0
I loved this book! The way that Cato integrates real history with her magic system is intricate and principled. The characters are diverse and fascinating. Highly recommended.
etoiline's review against another edition
4.0
Breath of Earth by Beth Cato is at once satisfying and disturbing. In a San Francisco with a subtly different history than our own, the great quake still happened, but for a much different reason than simple plate tectonics. We experience this magical place through a steampunk lens, while also examining the forgotten way things really happened. The author brings up feminism, racism, and lgbt rights, without being overly preachy. Yes, a genre novel that made me think.
The world is wonderfully built, using the scaffold of true history and coloring it with Asian influence, for well explained reasons. So why disturbing? As a person of Chinese descent it was uncomfortable to see “my culture” as the bad guys, or the ones that everybody looked down on. Intellectually I know that was the case in actual history, but no one talks about it. I'm pleased to hear about all the research that the author did to find the hidden history of the area, and her ability to combine the actual past with her magical world is refreshing and intriguing.
I enjoyed the characters in this novel. People acted in reasonable, realistic ways, while pushing back against the norms of the time. The worldbuilding is excellent, describing a historic place that feels true to its reality but delightfully embellished with magic and cultural elements that I could believe in. Topics that tend to fluster the less progressive among us are presented in believable context, talked about in a natural way, neither harped upon or shoved under a rug. Huzzah diversity in fiction! Highly recommended.
Received as a free digital ARC via Edelweiss and the publisher. I have also met the author at conventions but this did not affect my review.
The world is wonderfully built, using the scaffold of true history and coloring it with Asian influence, for well explained reasons. So why disturbing? As a person of Chinese descent it was uncomfortable to see “my culture” as the bad guys, or the ones that everybody looked down on. Intellectually I know that was the case in actual history, but no one talks about it. I'm pleased to hear about all the research that the author did to find the hidden history of the area, and her ability to combine the actual past with her magical world is refreshing and intriguing.
I enjoyed the characters in this novel. People acted in reasonable, realistic ways, while pushing back against the norms of the time. The worldbuilding is excellent, describing a historic place that feels true to its reality but delightfully embellished with magic and cultural elements that I could believe in. Topics that tend to fluster the less progressive among us are presented in believable context, talked about in a natural way, neither harped upon or shoved under a rug. Huzzah diversity in fiction! Highly recommended.
Received as a free digital ARC via Edelweiss and the publisher. I have also met the author at conventions but this did not affect my review.
diceydruid's review against another edition
5.0
This book is a great read, easy to get through, and impossible to put down. I really enjoyed it, especially because of the mythical elements that draw on countless cultures and people.
liliavisser's review against another edition
3.0
Enjoyed it a lot, but at the end
i was just thinking that this story is more lile Empirw Strikes Back than Star Wars: it has a beginning and a middlw, but no real ens. Fortunately enough the next book is coming out in September...
It's still worth reading, for sure.
i was just thinking that this story is more lile Empirw Strikes Back than Star Wars: it has a beginning and a middlw, but no real ens. Fortunately enough the next book is coming out in September...
It's still worth reading, for sure.