Genre: Fantasy, Alternate History
Publisher: Tor.Com
Length: 110 pages
Format: eARC
Rating: 3.5 stars
Publication Date: August 21th 2018
Publisher’s description
Creeper, a scrappy young teen, is done living on the streets of New Orleans. Instead, she wants to soar, and her sights are set on securing passage aboard the smuggler airship Midnight Robber. Her ticket: earning Captain Ann-Marie’s trust using a secret about a kidnapped Haitian scientist and a mysterious weapon he calls The Black God’s Drums.
But Creeper keeps another secret close to heart–Oya, the African orisha of the wind and storms, who speaks inside her head and grants her divine powers. And Oya has her own priorities concerning Creeper and Ann-Marie…
Book Review
Creeper is a young teenager living by herself on the streets of an alternate steampunk version of New Orleans. However, she doesn’t intend to live this way her entire life: her goal is to get the hell away from the streets and, hopefully from New Orleans altogether. Her opportunity to do so comes up when she hears about the disapperance of a scientist and how it might be linked with the Black God’s Drums, a mysterious weapon that could destroy New Orleans in the blink of an eye.
Creeper intend to use this information to flee the city, however, Oya, the goddess who constantly whispers in her ears have other wishes for her.
I haven’t been reading a lot of fantasy lately and I usually don’t like steampunk books. However, I read a couple of reviews gushing about this little novella (and I have to say that the gorgeousness of the cover may have helped as well), so I decided to request this book anyway since I usually like the range of novellas from Tor.Com.
I’m very glad I read this book because I ended up enjoying it quite a bit. It’s a fast read set in a fascinating city and the main character, Creeper, was an interesting one for sure. She’s young and sometimes a bit stubborn but she’s very clever, ambitious and full of good intentions. She knows what she wants and she isn’t afraid of fighting for it which made her perspective very interesting.
The world, the magic system and the constant presences of gods influencing the characters were all very interesting. I would definitely read other stories set in this world, Clark’s descriptions made it very easy for me to picture how everything looked and worked without ever feeling like too much.
My only issues with it were the fact that I wished the novella was a bit bigger because I found some events a bit rushed towards the end. I also sometimes struggled a bit with the writing. Indeed a lot of characters don’t speak a very good English and, being set in New Orleans, they often use French words that they mispronounce as well and it made it hard for me to understand some of their sentences. It was oddly bothering me even more with the French words than the English ones (if you don’t know, I’m French and English isn’t my first language) . For example, the characters mentionned “Maddi grà” a lot and it took me quite a while to get that characters were talking about “Mardi Gras”. It’s not an issue for one word but it happened several times and it was a bit annoying.
Anyway, except for those little things, I quite enjoyed The Black God’s Drums and I would recommend this story. It is a very fun, fast-paced novella set in a fascinating world.
Recommended.
The Curious SFF Reader 
I think I’ve heard that comment about the characters’ language in other reviews, it definitely sounds like it would take some getting used to. But you’re right, I was also drawn to this because of the cover. Hopefully I can find time to read it one of these days:-)
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It’s a very quick read, I read it in about two sittings. 🙂
As for the language it was a bit hard especially at first, I would have probably enjoyed the story a bit more if I had listened to it because it might not have been as noticable.
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Sometimes, those little language annoyances (for want of a better word) can spoil our enjoyment of a story because they keep nagging at us like a very persistent mosquito 😀
But the story sounds worth a little effort, indeed. Thanks for sharing!
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Yes, it was exactly like that, it wasn’t awful but a bit annoying in the end! However, it was still a lot of fun! 🙂
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