Finished
The Dragon, the Witch, and the Railroad by
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, 5th in her Songs from the Seashell Archives series, and we finally get to see the actual seashells and find out what they're for. I
really enjoyed the original series when I got them from Fictionwise and an RAEBW sale years ago, so I picked this up during a Kobo coupon promo. This was apparently revived via Kickstarter campaign (and comes with nice B&W interior illustrations that were probably a stretch goal) and takes place a century or so into the future with a cast that seems only vaguely related to the original characters.
This is even more whimsical and tongue-in-cheek than the previous novels, which were intentionally silly situation-based comedic fantasy to begin with—I thought for sure that this story was being set up as a pseudo-Victorian plucky beleaguered orphan adventure parody—so it's probably just as well that the tone of the formerly vaguely medieval-ish world has also changed. It's now a dragonpunk Industrial Age where the usefulness of readily-controllable flame, heat, and steam have made dragons exploited commodities under working conditions that bring to mind the plight of Lady Sybil's Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons in Ankh-Morpork, and also the overt use of magic has faded from the public consciousness for reasons which provide for a little more complexity in the plot.
Mild recommend if you enjoyed the original series and would like to see more of the world, albeit at an unexpected future evolution. This was a nice light read and it did tie into and wrap up some loose developments from the previous novels. But it mostly feels sufficiently disconnected from the earlier generationally ongoing storyline that it's more like the humorous world-hopping epilogue in Steven Brust's
Iorich than a further chapter of adventures. (I should also note that the Kobo version via Smashwords has suffered mildly from the Meatgrinder, with double spacing between lines throughout. But at least that's an easy fix with ePub.)