Arthur Slade's the Hunchback Assignments

Once in a great while I do a few reviews for the venerable Canadian publishing magazine Quill and Quire. They have just posted my review of Arthur Slade's terrific new steampunk novel for young people, The Hunchback Assignments.

Slade’s London is an engrossing mélange of the historically precise and the ridiculously imaginative. Working within the genre of steampunk, a mode of speculative fiction that posits a world of technological invention within the trappings of the Victorian Era, Slade crafts a world in which the sad reality of children “[sifting] through the mud at low tide for coal, bits of rope, anything to sell for a penny” exists alongside fantastic armoured men powered by gyroscopes made of “steel bones, the steam pumping out of holes in narrow iron plates.”

Read the entire review here.