rooks and romanticide fell from my good graces with such swiftness that this review ought to be accompanied by a slide whistle. right off the bat, all the copy is misleading because this book is not steampunk. now, i'm not a reader of steampunk, and i think that a lot of the cool ideas for worldbuilding have been forever marred by dweeby associations, but even i know that this book is not steampunk. there are no steampunk elements to be found within these pages, there are just guns, dull characterization, and some extremely weird racism. i don't know why the copy calls it steampunk, and the 'alternate london' angle doesn't really work either.

for 7/8 of the duration, you're supposed to accept that it's Grimdark Mafia London with a strong russian presence and a few slightly changed words. i don't often read alternate history because i find such superficial changes such as these to detract from the plot rather than add anything, which is exactly the case here. it adds nothing, and makes me wonder why radke who, according to his author bio, is a student of history with an interest in both victorian england and russia (just in general, i suppose) did not go further and fuse these two interests into something truly new and alternate. alternate history should be used as a genre to explore the different potential outcomes of major events, it is, first and foremost, speculative. a recent example which i read was farthing by jo walton, which is a country house mystery wherein britian (against churchill's wishes) surrendered to the axis powers. it is often familiar, in fact too familiar at points, but it is also recognizably Other. another example: river of teeth by sarah gailey imagines a world wherein james buchanan's 'hippo act' was passed and the american south became a breeding ground for hundreds of hippopotamuses who are summarily used for Crime. the crux is fantastic, and yet it is based in a reality which could have been. rooks and romanticide on the other hand, speculates nothing, lays no groundwork for an uncanny history beyond changing a word every 50 pages, which brings us to my Geographical Beef.

for literally the first 220 pages of this 250 page book, i imagined 'new london' to be basically just. the same london as we know existed in 1890 (don't get me started on the timeline) with more guns and a few slightly russian-flavoured signifiers. lazy and boring but, okay, sure. and THEN there's the absolute bombshell that actual russian city yekaterinburg (formerly sverdlovsk, the place where the romanovs were executed for those playing at home) is a day's drive from new london??? so now we have two possibilities (unless it is somehow a third, stupider thing)

neither of these make any sense. it would actually make sense if new london is in england and yekaterinburg stays in russia, because everyone with the ruslanivs is constantly talking about people being Banished To Yekaterinburg. yeah, if you live in england and banish your family members to live out their shame in the fucking urals, nobody they know will ever see them again unless they have also been banished. but levi is banished for exactly one chapter and gets back to new london just in time to die. maybe bury your gays is good sometimes

the plot and characters spend 250 pages flip-flopping between poles of equal nothingness. cain and levi make the same decisions over and over again, i don't even know how this book spans 250 pages since i can hardly recount the plot; this isn't due to narrative confusion, but rather a lack of narrative. it's all i hate you for lying oh no you are kinda hot tho how dare you betray me i think we need to end this blood feud over and over and over and over and over again. any character who is not cain or levi (who aren't exactly winning any awards for charcterization any time soon) has no personality or purpose to speak of, beyond clumsy exposition of course. doubly--nay triply so if that character is a woman.

the way this book completely disregards women as like. people. blew me away. women are fucked in a throw-away line, they're shot, they're killed. they're only seen as worthy of either of the protagonist's attention or narrative sympathies if they present as somewhat masculine or partake in activities that are coded as masculine, and even that can't save them. god it's SO fucking grim. not counting the moms, because they aren't characters, the three women who can conceivably be called "supporting" "characters" all get, well, fucked by fate. aunt ophelia is killed in an ambush, which makes somewhat narrative sense since she is the family member who cain is closest to (she's the most traditionally 'masculine' of the three, which mainly comes down to wearing trousers and overseeing gang shit) but LOOKS real bad when you look at the others. cain's cousin fiancee, emily, shows up a handful of times before being sent off to the country to be safe with her parents following her broken engagement. i feel so bad for emily, not because her fiance is gay, but because he's unbearable. emily has one line in her weird pov chapter (there are a couple of chapters where nonsense side characters narrate for no conceivable reason) where she's like 'maybe i should learn how to fire a gun' and the reader is supposed to be like Wow Girlboss! she's finally valid but like emily learn how to fire a gun so you can murder cain. and then witch, whose given name is never mentioned, is one of levi's gang buddies who serves NO purpose other than to be the token girl, have the occasional weird comment about her body, and disappear during the final shoot-out.

which (witch) leads us to the final point i can talk about before my brain reaches the consistency where i can hold a cup to my tilted head and pour a grey-matter smoothie out of my ear: the weird racism. witch is either intended to be or coded as roma (which would track if we're still on the russia-england train; the ruska roma are the largest romani subgroup in russia & belarus). i genuinely cannot tell if radke intended her to be roma or just wanted her to read as ~exotic, and believe me, he does NOT call her roma. the idea of romani people and culture as being ~exotic and orientalized in a way which would be right at home were this book actually written in 1890 as opposed to 2015 is so pervasive in such a strange way.  i've picked out some quotes for your perusal:

"Her [Witch] smile had crossed the line and become a pure simper, a few curls come loose from her tight braid and bouncing at her ears. The dark beauty mark on her left cheek made her look all the more ascetic. [Roma],almost." p.90

"Maggie was a strong woman. Full lips, an oval face, and a straight nose made her a very staid-looking maid, but there was a tenderness in her eyes that created a sort of [roma]-like beauty out of it all. Dark hair contrasted with her smooth olive-colored skin lusciously, and she was far from the frail, petite, birdlike thing girls and ladies struggled to be." p.199

"Indelibly, intrinsically Eastern it was inside, almost [romani] with its iconostasis stacked neatly below the crucifix." p. 218

"The woman—had Levi called her Witch?—sprang forward, shrieking something in that harsh [romani] slang as she whipped out two ornate revolvers, which she aimed at Cain recklessly. [...] Suddenly they all spoke rapidly in that foreign tongue—Eliott, the Witch, Levi, the others—that familiarly coarse but beguiling clip, and Cain fought a cringe. He saw Father Kelvin’s again, the gross Eastern decadence, the sound of everyone shouting in that ascetic language." p. 228

there are also the persians who are employed by cain's family to just....hang around being persian and entertain??? at the party in the first few chapters where our lovers meet, they're mentioned as dancing and snake charming while a romani "hag" (exact word) reads tarot. they're just in the background in a very odd and uncomfortable way, here are a selection of the ways that farsi is described in the text:

"She followed Cain, and around them were the Dietrich protective services, like obedient hunting hounds—Mr. Collins, Percy, Hazel, and the Persians, whispering in that smooth exotic cadence of theirs." p. 94

"Emily stood at the nearest turn, with the Persians behind her, whispering in their bubbling brook of a language. " p. 141

exoticism is cool if you're writing mediocre white gay romance i guess. i'm so tired. i have a migraine from typing this up.

lastly it's so fucking stupid that levi's top-secret splinter gang is named BLACK. yes in all caps all the time. it doesn't even stand for anything. his gun is always called ROOK, also in all caps.