Review: Phoenix Rising

Phoenix Rising by Philippa Ballantine

• Pub. Date: April 26, 2011
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Paperback , 416pp

Ohh Philippa I love your brain!
The characters in Phoenix were so complex in ways and so awesome. I loved the detailed steampunk and the world building. As the book progressed I could not put it down. I ate up the pages in one whole long night..er..morning leaving the kids to fend with toaster waffles and juicy juicy.
Steampunk is such an interesting genre for me. I love the detailed description and of course the clothing!
While I personally would probably not wear it I love the rich attire and then there is the dialog. The dialog in steampunk has all of these new words to me, wiki has my homepage.
The aspect that I loved most from Phoenix Rising was the fact that Eliza totally took the scene, the initiative and the action in the book. The male character Brooks, was more reserved and not as strong willed as most male characters in steampunk, so I do love my ladies who are worth their salt in life and disturbance.
Need some steam?! Get a Phoenix.

Book Blurb:

Evil is most assuredly afoot—and Britain’s fate rests in the hands of an alluring renegade . . . and a librarian.

These are dark days indeed in Victoria’s England. Londoners are vanishing, then reappearing, washing up as corpses on the banks of the Thames, drained of blood and bone. Yet the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences—the Crown’s clandestine organization whose bailiwick is the strange and unsettling—will not allow its agents to investigate. Fearless and exceedingly lovely Eliza D. Braun, however, with her bulletproof corset and a disturbing fondness for dynamite, refuses to let the matter rest . . . and she’s prepared to drag her timorous new partner, Wellington Books, along with her into the perilous fray.

For a malevolent brotherhood is operating in the deepening London shadows, intent upon the enslavement of all Britons. And Books and Braun—he with his encyclopedic brain and she with her remarkable devices—must get to the twisted roots of a most nefarious plot . . . or see England fall to the Phoenix!