Dreadnought / Cherie Priest

Dreadnought by Cherie Priest (a novel of the Clockwork Century). 400 p.

This book provided the rollicking read that I had hoped for, and didn't really get, from Boneshaker, Priest's previous book in the setting. The American Civil War has been raging for 20 years or so. Vinita Lynch, called Mercy, has been working as a nurse in a Confederate hospital in Virginia. Her husband is off fighting--for the Union, although Mercy's sympathies lie with the South. Two days after she finds out that her husband died in Andersonville, she receives a telegram asking her to travel to Tacoma to see her father, who's probably dying. Mercy hasn't seen him since she was 10, when he left her and her mother to go West; they waited for him to send for them, but he never did. Still, she decides to make the trip, by airship, boat, and train. The trip is far from simple, what with the war and...other hazards.

Especially at the beginning, Priest does an admirable job of describing the feel of the times from a civilian's point of view: despair at the never-ending fighting that is killing two countries' young men, the unreliability of information available, the need to hide personal circumstances when meeting strangers. The hospital scenes that open the book are realistic depictions of what nursing was like during the real Civil War.