Journal Entry 1 by Findabair from St. Hanshaugen bydel, Oslo fylke Norway on Tuesday, June 03, 2008

I bought this book at the train station in Manchester in order to have something to read on the train. I picked this one because I was curious about it.

It turned out to be one of the strangest books I have ever read.

I really don't quite know how to describe it. It is some sort of steampunk I guess. It takes place in an unnamed city that is probably based on London, sometime during the equivalent of the nineteenth century. The three main characters, Miss Temple, Cardinal Chang and Dr Svenson, discover a conspiracy to take over the country. The conspirators try to effect their plans by making people undergo a mysterious Process involving lots of strange machinery that hisses and steams and is attached to the body of the victim by aid of a pair of goggles. Miss Temple, Cardinal Chang and Dr Svenson all try to hinder this conspiracy as well as they are each of them capable of. The perspective changes between each of these three characters in each of the chapters, and mostly they act independently of each other, in between the times when their paths cross.

The plot is intricate; perhaps too much so at times. What really makes the book something special is the atmosphere it describes. It is gloomy, scary, strange, nasty... One of the reviews printed on the cover compares it to the film Eyes Wide Shut. This makes sense to me; it has something of the same feeling of the hostile unknown, the sexy scariness, the fascination for masks and hidden identities.

All in all the book is rather impossible to describe, and I can only recommend that it be read, for anyone who likes a strange, gothic adventure story. 

Journal Entry 2 by LeishaCamden from Alna bydel, Oslo fylke Norway on Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Got this from Findabair at meetup this afternoon. Thank you!! This is a book I really really want to read. :-) A lot of that is to do with the design, I'm afraid; I just absolutely love the design of this book. Fantastic. But I am also interested in the content (not just the cover ;-). It sounds like a very unusual book and like the type of story that I normally enjoy. :-)