The Explosionist

I finally got it last week. It's by Jenny Davidson, who is over there on the links list as Light Reading. She's a person I don't know at all, except she seems to be living one of my fantasy lives. What with being in New York and being a writer of young adult fiction and teaching literature at a proper university and such like things. Also, she seems to eat at some damn fine restaurants, which I wouldn't say no to as a general thing.

But back to the book. For unknown reasons it doesn't seem to be generally available in Australia. Or at least, not where I could find it. It ought to be, because it is an ace story of adventure and horrifying horrors, set mostly in Edinburgh. The main character, Sophie, seems not to get to eat in nice restaurants, but has bigger problems. One is that in her universe Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo, and Europe is quite hostile to the northern states, which maintain shaky kind of independence by manufacturing dynamite, when obviously no one in their right minds would do anything so risky (!) Sophie also has an aunt with highly dubious opinions (and not just on weight issues and the appropriateness of wearing Mickey Mouse jumpers). And someone is blowing stuff up all over the place.

There is, however, hope for Sophie's diet in the future, and also on the plus side there are trams.

I can't wait to read the next one, and I keep wondering how Sophie is going to extract herself from the remarkably difficult situation she finds herself in. And I'm looking forward to meeting the brain in the jam jar.