SOULLESS by Gail Carriger

Published in 2009 to great reviews and tremendous sales Gail Carriger’s Soulless, is a whimsical steam punk paranormal romance with Vampires, Werewolves, and Parasols (please, never umbrellas.) It is the first of the Parasol Protectorate series, which concludes this March with the publication of Timeless.

The book’s protagonist is Alexia Tarabotti, who lives life under a number of difficult conditions. She is soulless, though that is a guarded secret from most of the world, her father, with whom she shares a complexion, was Italian, an ancestry hardly praised  in Victorian London, and she’s a spinster, her marriage prospects considered to be non-existent as totters on in the advanced age of twenty-something.

Alexia’s London is not our Victorian setting, but one where the werewolves, vampires, ghosts, and other unworldly creatures of the night have become part of English Society, influencing fashion, politics, and colonialism.

Alexia’s comfortable if somewhat boring life is disrupted when an unknown, hiveless vampire attacks her and she is forced to dispatch the creature. Being soulless, a trait the unfortunate vampire seemed terminally ignorant about; Alexia’s touch negates all supernatural abilities. QueenVictoriadispatches an investigator, the Scottish werewolf Lord Canall Maccon whom harbors ill feeling towards Alexia over ‘the hedgehog incident’. not only to probe into the unlawful destruction of this vampire, but into his mysterious origins as a hiveless vampire is the best knowledge, impossible as all vampire are products of the a hive queen.

Alexia is quickly drawn into a adventure of mysterious appearing vampire and mysteriously disappearing werewolves while dealing with the infuriating Lord Maccon and bothersome American scientists.

Soulless is a fun read, wonderfully free of angst and best described as whimsical. The book is a light, fast read that promotes giggling and isn’t afraid to look silly. Escapism gets a bad rap in entertainment, but there is a place and a need for escapist fare. One cannot dine happily upon staid state dinners every evening, the occasional good times, good drink, and good food with friends are also good dining and Soulless is to books what these fun diner days are to posh restaurants. The characters are well drawn and distinctive, each bringing a set of traits that promotes comedic effect rather than having comedy forced upon them. The plot moves quickly and yet takes the time to hint, display, and illuminate Gail’s marvelous world building. While her vampires are inspired from the same traditions of Dracula and her werewolves are clearly derived from, as are nearly everyone’s these days, Sidomak’s Wolf-Man, she adds more than enough to make each fresh and her own.

The most memorable misstep in the novel was that Gail explained the ‘hedgehog incident,’ an event that should have forever remained unknown and therefore of limitless possibilities in her fans’ minds, but really that is a very small flaw in my opinion.

This is a book I would have not read had I not known the author personally, and I would have been poorer for that loss.