Somewhere in the frozen North, it doesn’t matter where, really, Henna is trying to forget that her parents and twin sister disappeared in a boating accident. Where she lives, it’s always cold and always snowing. She writes encyclopedia entries and takes long snowshoe walks with her dog, Rembrandt.
Historian and professor Serena Zabin approaches the American Revolution tipping point through the lens of societal and personal relationships. The story of the incident we learn in school is presented as black and white, but the circumstances behind it were much more complicated.
Prejudice and hatred are simmering beneath the rock strewn and inhospitable Promised Land. The characters, flung into the wilds of a New World, are on the knife’s edge between survival and destruction.
As with her previous books, Pulley develops slightly steampunk-y science that is delightful. She invents interesting physics that seem like they just might work. At the same time she tells a great story with danger, adventure, kindness, mystery, and oddness.
With Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle prefigured some forensic techniques that wouldn’t be used for decades. E. O. Heinrich did it in real life. He pioneered a nonexistent field of criminology through innovation, imagination and dogged methodologies.