Karen Memory

Karen Memory is the Elizabeth Bear novel where she takes the steampunk Western setting, gives it to a 16-year-old seamstress at a high-end Pacific Northwest brothel called Madame Damnable's Hôtel Mon Cherie, and lets her tell the entire story in a particular voice that I would press into the hands of any reader who claims contemporary SF cannot do voice. Karen is a working professional, a survivor of her own backstory, and the kind of first-person narrator who tells you what is happening in a way you cannot stop reading.

The plot involves a mysterious badly hurt woman who shows up at Madame Damnable's door, a US Marshal who is investigating a series of murders, an alternate-history Seattle (the city in this universe is called Rapid City) full of steam-powered technology and a local political establishment that is mostly corrupt, and a slowly developing romance that the book treats with patience.

Bear is doing several things at once and almost all of them work. The voice is the genuine pleasure. The action is well-staged. The romance earns its weight. The closing chapters land with appropriate force.

Five stars. One of the most enjoyable SF novels of the 2010s. Recommended without reservation.