Marinda Peake is a woman with a quiet, perfect life in a small village; she long ago gave up on her dreams and ambitions to take care of her ailing father, an alchemist and an inventor. When he dies, he gives Marinda a mysterious inheritance: a blank book that she must fill with other people’s stories – and ultimately her own.
I haven’t read Clockwork Angels (the first volume in this world), but it’s not needed to be able to read this story; it works brilliantly as a stand-alone as well as fitting into the existing universe. The story follows Marinda, forced out of her comfortable – and boring – life and forced to seek stories to fill her book. She travels to the well-ordered, well-maintained capital, seeking more than just the few sentences of most of the folk around her. But as she searches for stories, trying to just fill the book and return to her perfect life, she finds that the world around her is not so willing to let her go – and that the stories, and people, she meets take her further than she ever thought possible.
The book is described as a “steampunk Canterbury Tales”, and it really is! Although Marinda’s story is fascinating, there are stories within it, too: an airship captain’s story of love and his time as an outlaw; a bookseller’s search between worlds for her lost love; a fisherman’s tale of mermaid and sea-creatures; the Watchmaker’s Daughter’s story; a musician striving to create the perfect beat; a miner seeking the beating heart of the mountain; a rebellion fighter’s tale of piracy and wealth. They are never interruptions to the main story; because Marinda meets every person whose story she learns, we see more of them through their own words. Every character adds a little more background, and the tales are gripping in themselves – we visit places only briefly mentioned and see tales that we’d never normally have known.
The world and the characters in this story are wonderful; inventive, imaginative and brilliant. Clockwork Lives is an easy read, but the world is so wonderful that I found myself wanting more once I’d shut the book – I will certainly go and look out Clockwork Angels, wanting more of the Watchmaker and Anarchist! The only loose end to me was the actual ending. I wanted to know what happened in more detail; did Marinda do anything else with the book? How did her worldview of her perfect society change, knowing what she knew, having had the adventure she did? What happened next?
Clockworld Lives is a wonderful, delightful slice of a vivid and steampunk world, encapsulating many varied stories and characters within one journey.
© Kate Coe, July 2016
Clockwork Lives by Neil Peart & Kevin J. Anderson
Published November 5th 2015
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
304 pages
This one looks so good. I love that it is packed with a thick story and what seem like great characters. I am reading Sun Valley Moon Mountains by Ajax Minor, ajaxminor.com is his site. It’s also loaded with story, and it’s so real. Great read out there!!!