I was given a complimentary review copy from the publisher via NetGalley. this did not affect my rating.

Steampunk novels are not really my genre of reading so I was a bit confused by the worldbuilding but the writing and the careful graft of the book were amazing. The attention to detail gave depth to the story, and I love slow pace books so this was my jam.

An issue I have is that the book is 500+ pages and the author could have cut a bit. I love the slow pace but sometimes it felt stagnant.

NetGalley ARC Educator 550974

This picks up 2 years after the first book. Some will be confused and others will be able to follow the flow. The art and story were still amazing. This can be a standalone read but it's best to read book one. Waiting patiently for the next installment.

Loved this! I loved the first book in this series, Flotsam, also, and was looking forward to this one. I would definitely recommend reading Flotsam first, Salvage is a direct continuation of the story with mostly all the same characters. This is set in a unique and fascinating world, where magic or at least sufficiently advanced technology as to appear magical has changed fundamental things like gravity and physics. Captain Talis is a strong, admirable character, and struggles to make the right decisions for her small crew, who are fiercely loyal and more like a family. Stranded in a mostly underground city, they patiently plan, save, and wait for their opportunity to once again have a ship. The wealth of mundane details like their carefully tailored clothes and frugal meals really give a sense of the characters' experiences and personalities. Plans go awry, less than ideal seeming opportunities present, and Talis and the crew find themselves once again on a ship, caught up in the conflicts that affect the entire world. This book, like the first, comes to a very satisfying conclusion, but there is clearly more story to tell and I'll be watching for the next installment!

Talis and the rest of her crew have been stranded, shipless since the Wind Sabre sank to the flotsam layer that surrounds Peridot, on Heddard Bay while they scrimp and save to build a new airship. Several groups (including an ostracized god) take an interest in Talis, hoping to pay, bribe, or force her to salvage the alien technology that made Meran possible, as well as other highly prized items. Talis and her crew or forced to navigate aliens, governments, gods, and old friends (and foes) as they try to set to rights what was broken so long ago.

A bit of a slow burn, Salvage picks up two years after the events of Flotsam. I loved learning more about the mysterious Meran and what powers she may or may not possess. We’re still on a treasure hunt, as much as Talis hates it. I think I would, to, since everyone thinks that Talis should find them a body, find them their missing jewelry, find me this alien technology…all for the going rate of the pleasure of doing so? No thank you! I really enjoyed being with the crew of the Wind Sabre again, always wondering what new gadget Sophie will come up with next.
If you enjoyed Flotsam, you definitely need to pick up Salvage! Fans of steampunk adventures, epic science friction, and if you loved Treasure Planet as much as I did….this book is a must read!

3.5 stars

Thank you so much to Netgalley and Robot Dinosaur Press for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I was SO excited to be approved for this one. I loved the first book in the series and couldn’t wait to dive back into this incredible world Theodore has created.

I was a little underwhelmed, I won’t lie. I still loved these characters and I’m still interested in where the overall plot is going, but for a 500+ page book which already had an entire book before it to set things up, not a whole lot ACTUALLY happened until the last 100 pages or so.

In the first book, I appreciated the slower pace and the care taken to deliver the smaller details and build suspense, but in this book, it felt stagnant instead of suspenseful.

Still, I can’t wait to see what happens next!

I found this one confusing and not always engaging. I read the previous book in the series about five years ago, and remembered very little of it; while there were eventually enough reminders of the key elements of backstory, I was at sea for a while. Looking back on my review of the previous volume (which I put on my Best of the Year list for 2017), I was also confused while reading that one, so it may be a fault of this author.

The worldbuilding, in particular, made no sense to me then and makes even less now. The cosmological setup is that five ancient alchemists (alchemists = wizards differently named; there doesn't seem to be any good reason for terming what they do alchemy specifically) destroyed the planet of Peridot in order to get enough power to make them gods, and then rearranged the pieces and each created a sentient race to follow them, plus various other species as they saw fit. The world now consists of a ball of energy called Nexus which somehow (apparently not by gravity as we know it) holds a number of floating islands in place around it, mostly in the same plane. They don't appear to rotate around it. There is gravity; things other than the islands (and airships which, improbably, pump steam into rigid wooden balloons in order to create lift) fall, not towards Nexus but in a direction perpendicular to Nexus, until they reach the flotsam layer at the "bottom of the gravity well," but nothing appears to be causing this gravity. It's just magic (sorry, "alchemy"). Also, weirdly, the air is thinner at the bottom of the gravity well. So physics as we know it is completely out to lunch. There's a passing mention of sunrise or sunshine at one point, which may be an error, as the lighting seems mostly to consist of bioluminescent pumpkins producing a day/night cycle. This leaves two alternative questions: If there's a sun, how is it producing day and night when the planet is no longer blocking it half the time? And if there isn't a sun, where did it go, since presumably there was one prior to the cataclysm? (And if there isn't a sun, where is the energy coming from to light the glow pumpkins and produce food and do all the other things that sunshine is needed for? Though I suspect the answer to that one is "alchemy".)

This wasn't the only thing that made me think that the author was doing something because it would be cool or serve the plot, at the expense of suspension of disbelief. Nor was it the only thing that confused me or left me unclear on how things worked. The five races, and the characters, are all described in an extensive glossary/gazetteer at the end of the book, but I didn't get enough in the text itself to get much idea of how most of the characters appeared, or to get straight for a long time what their membership in the different races meant for their appearance (or even which race they belonged to, sometimes).

The narrative is close third person, mostly but not exclusively following the viewpoint of the ship captain who was the main character of the first book also. She's an interesting character, and we get some interiority from her and, to a lesser extent, from the other viewpoint characters, but the characters around her are much more two-dimensional, including her beloved and loyal crew. I never really got much sense of Tisker or Dug's personalities, in particular. They exist almost entirely in relation to Talis, the protagonist.

She is a protagonist, not merely a main character; she's constantly striving to prevent worse things happening to the world, and reverse some of the bad things that have happened already. The thing is, she's not all that effective at it, and partway through we get a major tragedy of the type that I personally dislike in my fiction.

Early on we're promised a heist, but this is one of the many plot directions that Talis ends up abandoning because of external factors. I'm all for a good try-fail cycle, but the thing about try-fail cycles is that they should generally complicate the protagonist's attempts to achieve their goals, not derail them entirely. Also, I wanted to see the heist, and I wanted to see Talis succeed in preventing disaster; I got neither.

I received a copy via Netgalley for review, which is labelled as the second edition and apparently will come out in July 2022 (the book has been published for a couple of years). Accordingly, I won't go into too much detail on the state of the copy editing except to say that it needs some more, including a spellcheck, a lot of work on misused vocabulary, and the insertion of some missed-out words in sentences. Not sure why almost all books with airships in them display poor writing mechanics and a lot of vocabulary problems, but that does seem to be the case. My review of the first book gave good marks for the copy editing, so I'm not sure what's going on there; maybe a different and less capable editor for the second one. If so, I hope they can get the original one, or someone else as good, to go over this one between now and July.

All in all, I was disappointed and confused and at times found it a slog. There's good potential here, but it needs a lot of polishing, and I don't think I'll bother with the third book when it comes out.

I was pretty excited to jump into this book. This is one of the first real steampunk books I have read and I really enjoyed how unique and different it felt. The characters felt well developed and their continuation of the first book smooth and interesting. I think the overall part of this book was very creative and fun. The sci-fi steam work very well together. The writing is also very cohesive and smooth. It feels connected and it makes sense throughout the book.