This week K.M. McKinley, author of The Iron Ship, stops by to answer some questions about her fascinating debut novel set in a quasi-industrial world and centered on a quintet of siblings. It’s a book you’ll want to pick up, so read on to learn how it came about. We’ll be giving away a copy of The Iron Ship to one random commenter with a U.S. address.

Bill Capossere: One of the aspects I liked quite a bit about The Iron Ship was that we were presented with a world with a clear sense of a future via industrial/technological moment... Read More

The Iron Ship by K.M. McKinley

K.M. McKinley’s The Iron Ship is a sprawling, slow build of a story that mostly follows the POV exploits of five siblings whose stories generally wend their own way, though each intersects with the others in varying ways and to varying degrees. With its large cast, leisurely characterization, separate plots, unhurried approach to worldbuilding, and focus on an accretion of detail (admittedly, sometimes to a somewhat befuddling amount), I can’t say McKinley’s debut is particularly energetic or compelling. But it does suck you in even as it acts as mostly prelude to what is to come.

The setting is “Earth” (not our Earth, McKinley is at pains to tell us in her afterword), a world with two moons and a sister planet known as the Twin that may possibly be edging ever nearer as part of a millennia-long cycle. More precisely, the novel sets itself in The Hundred Kingdoms, ... Read More

The City of Ice by K.M. McKinley

I was going to start out this review of K.M. McKinley’s The City of Ice (2016) by saying that I could pretty much cut and paste the first paragraph of my review of its predecessor The Iron Ship, since it matched exactly what I’d say about The City of Ice. But then I realized why say I could when I actually can do that. So here it is, with some edits.

The Iron Ship City of Ice is a sprawling, slow build of a story that mostly follows the POV exploits of five siblings whose stories generally wend their own way. With its large cast, leisurely characterization, separate plots, unhur... Read More

The Brass God by K.M. McKinley

The Brass God (2018) is the third installment in K.M. McKinley’s THE GATES OF THE WORLD series begun with The Iron Ship and continued in City of Ice. By now, readers should be accustomed to the slow pace and sprawling structure, and The Brass God offers more of the same, though it’s better paced than its predecessor. I’m not sure everyone will have the patience for this series, but if you can muster it up, I remain convinced it’s well worth it.

The Brass God picks up pretty much right after City of Ice and continues the story of... Read More