Cathedral Child/Lea Hernandez

Cathedral Child by Lea Hernandez (Texas Steampunk, book 1); steampunk, manga; 112 pages

The setting of this book is what made me pick this up. Set in a remote part of west Texas in the late 19th century, this is the story of Glory and Sumner, two brilliant mechanics who can communicate with the great machine known as Cathedral. The goal of the Cathedral project is to create a sentient machine, but Cathedral has never quite lived up to that goal--until Glory starts to speak with it.

This story had a lot of promise, but didn't quite live up to it. Or maybe it did, and I just didn't get it--because I found this book almost impossible to follow at some points. It's not just the art (which is good, but doesn't handle action scenes particularly well), but the page layout and the way Cathedral's "speech" is handled: the disembodied "voice" of the machine would probably be really cool on film, but is hard to distinguish from narration and thought bubbles in the text, and confusing as to how I should interpret it (is this music, with a translation included? An actual voice? R2-D2 noises???). I'll still pick up Hernandez's next book in this series, in the hopes that she's improved her storytelling a little.