I was given a review copy of this lovely, amus­ing and affect­ing work many months ago, and just now got around to writ­ing the deserved review (at Ama­zon). Which I reprint below, just because I like the story so much:

Let me try to be telegraphic:

Nelson’s tale is writ­ten in a voice that rings sur­pris­ingly true to the (shadow) 19^th Century’s own voice: lan­guage, metaphor, idiom and fram­ing are all spot-​​on for a sup­pressed Twain tale from a little-​​known lit­er­ary mag­a­zine Editor’s secret papers, dis­cov­ered in a shut­tered attic lap desk among a firebrat-​​infested stack of ledgers and cor­re­spon­dence. This in itself is a fun and lovely act of artistry; you can’t just talk “old-​​fashionedy” and get away with it. This is words done good, and every one.

The slip­stream, steam­punk, and oth­er­wise fan­tas­ti­cal ele­ments are no more or less jar­ring than those we mud­dle our­selves through every day out here—no here, on the three-​​dimensional side of the screen, in daily life. What hap­pens to our nar­ra­tor and cun­ningly per­cep­tive pro­tag­o­nist and the town they live in (all poised at the edges of their respec­tive tran­si­tional cliffs) is no more science-​​fictional than the phan­tom vibra­tions I get in my leg when I have no phone, or the habit I’ve gained of tap­ping words on a paper page expect­ing to see a definition.

And this, most of all and with no lit­tle risk of seem­ing provin­cial to some more worldly reader: This is a story about Amer­i­cans and the awful won­der­ful thing we’ve acci­den­tally done to one another and the rest of you, lib­er­ally mixed against our types’ his­tor­i­cal pref­er­ences, rebelling against and egging on the emer­gent change that arises from that mix­ing, and in our very par­tic­u­lar ways watch­ing in won­der as entire worlds find ways to fit snugly inside a sin­gle story together.

By which of course I mean your story and mine.

So: Get this, read this, rec­om­mend it.