Soulless by Gail Carriger

Soulless came into my life like many great books do: by referral. It was a Book End Babes HoLITday gift guide recommendation by one of our book club queenBs, and I knew from the cover it would be a quirky fun read (kudos to the art director for that spot-on design).

Carriger say she knew she wanted to write urban fantasy (supernatural/werewolf/vampires) and noticed that a lot of the genre is contemporary. But she figured these creatures had to have been around for a long time, right? So she set her story in the Victorian times in England and gifts us with a wonderful protagonist, Alexia, who is a preternatural, meaning she has no soul. This doesn’t make her mean, but it does mean she can’t be harmed by vampires, and in fact, kills a vampire at the beginning of the book (self-defense, of course.)

The book has mystery (what’s happening to the vampires?), politics (BUR, where all vampires and werewolves must be registered), and romance (Alexia falls for the area Alpha, Lord Maccon, a handsome werewolf). I loved SOULLESS not just for the adventure, but because Alexia is so easy to love – she’s tough, no-nonsense and must work harder for her position because she is a spinster (and a homely one, at that) and she’s a preternatural, which she must hide from her family, as well as society.

Carriger knows how to world-build and suck us in to this delightful story of a co-mingling proper society where things like the full moon and daylight matter, but only as much as serving delicious tarts at your party. If you haven’t tried urban fantasy, but enjoy historical romance, this would be an easy add. If you like urban fantasy, but are looking for something different, give SOULLESS a try. While the spinsterhood, romance, Victorian angle seems ripe for women’s readership, I think men who enjoy historicals and urban fantasy would get a kick out of it, too.

Buy it at Amazon.

I’m looking forward to CHANGELESS, Carriger’s second book in the series, due in 2010.