I made the
mistake of thinking this was a steampunk anthology; it’s not. It’s Gaslamp
Fantasy; fantasy stories set in the Victorian era with magic included. Here you
will no find brass goggles or airship pirates. But it was a happy mistake,
because I enjoyed this book very much.
Victoria reigned for a very long time, so there is variety of events,
inventions, real people, and movements to choose from when writing in the era. A
couple of the stories are actually about Victoria; the title story is, if you
know about the relationship between Victoria and Prince Albert, heartbreaking as
well as a warning to be careful what you wish for when working magic. I loved
‘For Briar Rose’ simply because it involved Edward Burne-Jones and William and
Jane Morris; the pre-Raphaelite artistic movement is simply my favorite ever.
In other stories, the Bronte family, Frankenstein, Scrooge and the Crachit
family show up. There is true horror- one story features one of the women who
worked in the match factories who developed the terrible ‘Phossy jaw’ where the
phosphate from the matches eats away the jaw bones. And ‘The Fairy Enterprise’ wherein
an amoral industrial decides to take advantage of gullible society and ends up
getting what he deserves made is a dark story, but made me laugh.
It’s a very
solid anthology; while there were, of course, a couple of stories I didn’t
like, they are all good and well written and I’m glad I read them.
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