I did not finish this because I never felt a connection with any of the characters or the story as a whole. I was pretty excited to read it after I'd read a short description (which was not wrong), but I read 30 percent of it (according to Kindle) and I still didn't give a hoot about anyone in it. I also felt like the "steampunk" designation is a stretch — there were some steam-powered bicycles in the first quarter of the book, and then an airship comes in, but mostly there's no technology at all, just a collection of varied people who either (a) are the original inhabitants of Leopold's Belgian Congo, or (b) came there from America or England to establish Liberia. It wasn't the absence of technology that put me off — it was that the plot never jelled into anything that made me desire to continue reading.