I had high hopes for this book, but I didn't make it past page 40; despite the fascinating story it's attempting to tell, the book is undone by two flaws. The smaller is that the author jumps around too much, attempting to juggle 8 women's lives; limiting the book to 2 or 3 would have been a big help.
But in the end I'm not sure this would have made any difference as what what really dooms the book is the author's inexcusable over-writing. In Kiernan's world, coal can't just be burned; instead the energy inside "could be released in dreamy blue flame and bestow its power on its liberators". The entire book is written like this, and it becomes incredibly annoying extremely quickly. The passage that finally drove me to give up is the author describing someone's hair:
She wore her dark brown hair parted on the left, undulating tousles washing past her prominent cheeks, ebbing again at her gymnast's shoulders, before landing with a final bounce at the top of a spine that exhibited the kind of impeccable posture grown out of a lifetime of grooming and horseback riding.
If you made it through that whole disaster of a sentence without gagging a little bit you're a stronger reader than me. Or as the author might write: The reader's eyes washed past the horribly overdone prose, his interest ebbing at the tiring text, before his desire to continue to read the book landed with a final thud as he tossed the book in the donation pile.
Take a pass on this one.
Grade: F
