Donald Maass Literary Agency

Booklist:  McCammon’s latest novel is a thrilling sf adventure. Two powerful, mysterious alien races are at war; Earth is caught in the middle, collateral damage. The planet is devastated, its people made nearly extinct. Those who have survived the catastrophic destruction caused by the alien war are succumbing to fallout from the battle, which is turning them into half-human creatures preying on those who are still human. Mankind seems doomed, but there is one small hope: a young boy who possesses powers that could save humanity. The problem is, the warring alien races might just prefer that humanity go extinct. Can this boy, who barely understands his own abilities, save the race? This is a very ambitious novel, an epic-scaled story of perseverance and survival in the face of monstrous odds. McCammon brings his usual storytelling gifts to the table: his ability to create characters who feel real, no matter how unreal the situations they find themselves in; dialogue that rings true; and a story that captures our imaginations from the very first page.

Foreword:  Genre-bending, gender-bending, dialect-filled, and fascinating, this steampunk novel handles old West racism with humor and grit. Lou Merriwether is a “psychopomp”—she has the ability to help spirits stuck in the land of the living cross over to the land of the dead. A well-wrought character, she dresses androgynously and often passes as a man; and as an Asian American, she handles Old West racism with humor and grit. Molly Tanzer’s steampunk world layers the rough Old West of goldrush San Francisco with the influx of Chinese immigrants and the Victorian propriety and technology attendant with the genre.

…But what is perhaps best done in the novel is the paranormal world building, shown as Lou does her work amongst spirits, from the gadgets and potions she uses to her means of communication—for Lou “the dead were so much easier to manage,” than the living. Sentence for sentence, Tanzer demonstrates a strong sense of language and place, and as a whole, the world is a place which definitely demonstrates influences (anthropomorphic bears call to mind The Golden Compass; Lou’s duster and shotgun, Pretty Deadly), but is wholly unique and pleasurable to become enveloped by.

Library Journal: Old West steampunk has another appealing heroine in Lou (pair her with the equally winsome female lead of Elizabeth Bear’s Karen Memory) to go along with the delightfully over-the-top villains. The pages turn themselves in this debut novel from a small press that deserves a big audience.

When several young Chinese men who left San Francisco to seek work on the railroad disappear without any word to their families, psychopomp Lou Meriweather is asked to investigate. Half Chinese and half English, Lou never fit into thewhite or the Chinese communities of the city, deciding instead to make her own way as a professional psycho-pomp, speaking to the dead and helping them move on to the afterlife. She travels to the Colorado Territories to seek the missing workers as a favor to her estranged mother, but the trail leads to a mysterious sanitarium, which harbors dark secrets.