I think this is the first time I've been genuinely burned by unknowingly picking up the first in a proposed series of books (and I say proposed, because I can find absolutely no mention on the internet that a sequel is even being considered.) While it does provide a solution to the most immediate part of the plot, so much is left open-ended, it broke my heart. So it lost a star to that, unfortunately.

Other than that, the book offers a fast read (though it does suspiciously drag in its first third, despite being pretty short) and engaging characters that are just left of being cartoonish, but in an entertaining way. And Jett and Gibbons definitely offer something different by way of heroines, in westerns or any other genre for that matter, coming from two different directions: Jett dresses like a boy to avoid harassment as she makes her way through the Old West in an attempt to find her brother, her only surviving family member after the Civil War, while Gibbons is an inventor, indulged by her rich and eccentric father, enlightened and liberated, with all of her faith put in Science. The two clash, the two become best friends. White Fox, the main male character, is sweet, but sort of inconsequential, and while there's a sulfurous whiff of brimstone and love triangle about their relationships, the book itself is obviously more interested in developing Jett and Gibbons' friendship.

Extremely historically accurate (as steampunk strangely seems to be) with a sense of fun and a wink to the plot on behalf of the authors, and just a bit of horror, I would be looking forward to learning what the airship means, if the man Shepherd was communicating is behind the disappearances, what the spell book White Fox received from his friend has to do with anything if the authors seemed to have any intention of continuing the story. Please, ladies? I'd definitely keep reading!

It's hard to pinpoint exactly why this felt a disappointment. It was a good, strong novel, with interesting characters (both of whom were new to me, not having read Clementine before this novel, so I hadn't been introduced to Maria "Belle" Boyd yet.) It's a solid ending to part of what the novels were about. And I think that's where my problems come from: It's the end. The last (full-length?) project in the series, and it perfectly wraps up the Civil War plot, bringing in Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln as main characters. Though they seem more like ciphers than they do fully rounded characters, like she took what we know of their personas and personalities and advanced them a little, tried to humanize, but didn't fully round either of them out. Grant comes off better, because he has more page time, but still a bit flat.

It's the last third of the book that justifies the read, with the stand-off at the Lincolns' home. Maria and Henry have excellent chemistry, and though they're story comes to an abrupt conclusion, those parts felt satisfying anyway, because of their character interaction. The airship chase and fight felt more exciting, not because I was focusing on their end goal, and their rush to get there, but because I cared about the characters and wanted to see them survive. A shame, then, that he gets hurt and there's only one small mention afterward to even let us know that he was alive. It's not a personal novel, to be sure; the story is obviously much more important than the characters, and it sort of suffers from that. Though that should have meant that it moved faster than it did in its first half.

It almost feels to me that nothing since Dreadnought really mattered, that Ganymede and especially The Inexplicables never even needed to happen, and that was a true shame to me, that it didn't feel like a climax or a conclusion to the entire series; instead, it made me wonder why we took those proverbial side streets at all.

We don't see the war end. Or, in fact, the apparent zombie apocalypse that occurs because, as we're told at the beginning of the novel, it's inevitable, even if they were able to end the war immediately. That was a bit of a cop out, and definitely left me wanting more. It was rushed, it was a disappointment. We simply get a small epilogue where Grant rushes to catch us up on what could have filled another five books, I think.

The world has always been the books strong point. And the characters, though sometimes I believed that the author herself didn't understand that, and they were simply a means to an end. I loved Maria, I loved, loved, loved Bardsley (and an extra star for having a story about the Civil war and including a black character, a former slave and current genius who essentially invents the central processing unit.) If it hadn't been the last book in the series, I think I would have been far more generous, and less likely to feel this heavy disappointment.