Nocturnal Book Reviews

4.5/5
Oh, I'm so glad I've read it on Christmas day and had myself quite a Clockwork Christmas :) Great book, albeit a bit manic, I had to race along with the plot to catch up plenty of times.

There are two main protagonists.

Alice, a daughter of an impoverished baron in Victorian London, secretly works with assembling and repairing automatons while struggling to keep up the appearances and find a rich husband to pay her ill father's debts.

Gavin is an 18 year-old American cabin boy on a merchant airship from Boston, captured by pirates and hauled to London for a ransom from his shipping company. The company refuses to pay for a lowly cabin boy and pirates plan to sell him into a brothel when Gavin escapes.

Apart from an unusual pairing where she is older than him, both characters are perky, brilliant and utterly charming. It's the world-building however that totally won me over.

The world in this setting has an epidemic called a clockwork plague. The majority of people who contract it die, some percentage becomes zombie and very very small percentage has their minds altered and become incredible mad inventors, whose genius can build amazing automatons, defy gravity, physical laws, space and dimensions. These clockworkers don't live longer than 2-3 years but in that span they create things that truly change the world.

Only 2 nations in the world utilise clockworkers - Brittania and China, and it's a neck to neck race between them in the war of inventions.

How Alice and Gavin fit into that? you would ask. The thing is, Alice's mind is rare enough to understand how clockworkers automatons work and Gavin with his genius for understanding and playing the most perfect musical notes makes him a sort of a clockworker pied piper :)

Oh dear, I hope I didn't give away too much! ;) Maybe just enough for you to pick up the book?

There are moments, especially Alice's indecision which are grating, however as someone who loves HR I accepted them as a part of Victorian heroine package and just let go. If you are willing to do the same, the whole book is a delightful mad adventure, and I'm really looking forward to the next instalment in the series.