TBR Challenge 2015: ‘WRECKED’, by Meljean Brook

Link to FictionDB

This year I decided to follow one reading challenge. This TBR Challenge 2015 sounded like the best option for me.

 The topic of this month is We Love Short Shorts!

Published: 2013

Genre: Steampunk

My Rating: 3 stars

Part of a series: A tale set in the Iron Seas world

In January the topic is a short story, novellas, category romances and the like. So I looked for an interesting short story in my kindle. And there it was: ‘Wrecked’ by Meljean Brook a novella of 30,000 words that was originally published in the anthology Fire & Frost, but I downloaded it digitally last December for free.

It was in my TBR pile because, well Meljean Brook is now one of my favourite authors and therefore I’m trying to read her backlist.

From the first page I found myself totally immersed in that amazing Iron Seas world. The heroine is Elizabeth, a woman on the run. Five years ago, she discovered that her father was a little bit crazy and it’s a threat to her. So she run away. And his father sent hunters in search of her.

A couple of years ago Caius, the best of her father’s hunters, found her. He trapped Elizabeth, but she escaped. Both Caius and her father thought that the girl could be dead, but they are not very sure so therefore they kept on searching.

So when Elizabeth sees some of her father’s hunters near her rooms, she knows she’s got to get away as soon as possible. An airship is the quickest way of disappearing. Elizabeth doesn’t see Caius with them, but she cannot wait to see if he’s there or not. An airship is going to take her from the British Islands to the Western Coast of Africa. It seems like she’s escaped again but of course Caius is just at her heels.

What follows is the usual mix of sweet love, steamy sex and a lot of adventure that I simply love in Meljean Brook’s novels. And of course danger, because, well –zombies.

I’ve always considered that the novella form works better if the main characters know each other beforehand. If they don’t, the story feels rushed and you can never be sure if the love is for real. So ‘Wrecked’ is exactly the way a short love story must be told, with people that has known –and secretly long for- each other for years. They have reasons not to give their trust but they need to work together in order to save Elizabeth. It’s wonderful to see how they build their relationship step by step –trust first, friendship later, love at last.

So it’s a story that, speaking in general terms, I liked a lot. A walk through the wondrous world created by Meljean Brook. If I compare it with other works by the same author, it’s not my favourite story, but it’s interesting and very enjoyable.

In this book, we find a glimpse of a particular spot in that strange world. The animals. It turns out that when the Horde controlled Africa and Europe, these wasted lands remained infested with zombies. With no people to bite, the zombies are devoted to attacking animals, so now millions of animals are endangered. What I was asking myself was how zombies can hunt animals. At the end of the day, the human being is by nature a scavenger animal. It took us millions of years to collaborate among us to be predators. So I was wondering how could these zombies attack and kill animals because any of them is stronger, faster and tougher than the body of a human. Then I remembered World War Z, and loads of zombies all at once attacking Brad Pitt and I said, well, perhaps it’s just a matter of simple and overwhelming numerical majority.

Although it’s a novella set in the Iron Seas world, so I consider it part of this series, it can stands alone perfectly well. As far as I see, you don’t need to read the rest of the series to enjoy this story.