2014 steampunk fantasy romance, third in the Clockwork Heart
trilogy. Taya and Cristof are on a diplomatic mission to Alzana,
trying to prevent a war, when the Alzanan coup is launched, and of
course as dubious foreigners they get blamed for the assassination of
the royal family…
But this isn't a story about being cut off in a hostile land.
Indeed, at first it's not clear what sort of story it's trying to be:
swashbuckling sky-borne adventure? Diplomatic manoeuvres? A critique
of the caste-system and governance of Ondinium? Any of these could
have made for an interesting book, but the way they're mixed together
none of them really gets enough development.
Then things move on to the Cabisi Islands, more technologically
advanced than the other powers but with a system of governance that
stops them from joining in other people's wars (except for selling
them weapons). Exploring that could have been an interesting volume in
an ongoing series.
But then it's off again, with an Alzanan princess who's one of the
last survivors of the royal family (and there's some good stuff here
about the fine shadings between "honoured guest", "guest but we won't
divert the ship to take you where you want to go", and "hostage");
Taya gets captured by the Alzanans, and there's some solid procedural
steampunk battling in a hidden tunnel system; then the Alzanans are
attacking the city with their devastating Cabisi terror weapons…
Too much happening, I think. I don't mind action, but I like the
people here and I want to see more of them when they aren't under
the stress of combat.
Taya and Cristof are still the heart of things, and they have
realistic problems and work them out. That's great. But the rest
didn't grab me all that much. The first book in this series was
superb, which gave the second and third a hard act to follow, and they
don't quite manage it; the frustrating thing is that I can picture the
book I did want to read, and it's not all that different from this
one. But the framing of war twists everything out of shape and cuts
off peaceful interactions that would have been more fun to read about.
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