Sapphique by Catherine Fisher

As is often the case in life, there's good news and there's bad news.  The good news is, this book was much better than the first one - and the first one was good too!  It may have been that I was just more familiar with Catherine Fisher's unique steampunk world the second time around, but overall things were less confusing and I was able to focus more on the characters and less on struggling to understand the environment.  The bad news is that Fisher truly does not currently plan on making this into a trilogy or longer series.  According to the FAQ on her website, Fisher left many things in the book loosely tied not to leave room for sequels, but to allow the reader to finish the book themselves.  Similarly, Fisher did not describe a few of the characters in the book so that the reader could create the characters themselves.  The most incredible thing about this is that I hadn't even realized until I read the FAQ on Fisher's website that she had done this.  Which means, of course, that the characters that I had seen running around the pages of these books had been entirely of my own creation.  This was a fun and unique approach and with the confidence I've gained from creating my own characters, I think I'll go ahead and finish the book in my head the way I feel it should have ended.

Many thanks to my friend Amber for sending me an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) of this months ago.  This book was published in December 2010 but you all would have been really impressed if I'd blogged about it last year when I first received it, eh?

Incarceron (Book 1)
Sapphique (Book 2)