I’ve been quiet here all month, this may have worried some of you for one reason, and others for another, or (more likely) it may have passed you all by completely. Vanity thy name is… In any regard there have been a number of reasons, among them a desire to get some actual writing done on my part, and a whole lot of reading, as the to read pile has become more of a to read hedge. If I hadn’t made some headway with it I suspect I would have had a druid infestation by the winter solstice and they can be hell to shift, and the mistletoe gets everywhere…

Also the fumigators cost a fortune, and they never get the remove the wickermen, which is just a fire hazard.

In any regard I got on top of some of my reading over the last couple of weeks so this is the first of some reviews I am behind on…

When I was in the middle of writing Passing Place, the writing of it had almost broken me, and I took a break from my big serious novel. But as I needed to keep writing (because its a compulsion) I through I would try my hand at some frivolous steampunk more or less on a whim. The main reason being I’d been to Whitby Goth-fest a few weeks before and got chatting to a load of steampunk’s in the bar.

In several bars in fact…

In any regard, without intending to pursue a career writing steampunk, which is to say I was writing it more or less to cleanse my mental pallet a little and amuse myself without ever intending to do anything with it, I started both the first Hannibal Smyth novel and the first Maybe novel more or less at the same time. It would be a few years before either was fully realised. Passing Place had to be finished first for one thing, a relationship needed to crash and burn, a minor breakdown needed to happen, followed by the reinvention of my inner-self… In essence, life needed to happen. However for Hannibal and Miss Maybe to be fully realised something else needed to happen too. I needed to read some steampunk…

This is not to say I had not read steampunk before, but I had not read many recent steampunk novels at the time, Plenty of Wells and Verne but nothing recent. The most recent steampunk I had read was Michael Moorcock’s Oswald Bastable trilogy which I had read in my early twenties when those novels were already twenty years old. Once Passing Place was written and I decided to see what I could maker of this Hannibal Smyth character that was knocking around my subconscious, and decided it might be a good idea before doing so to read some recent ‘mainstream’ steampunk novels. Mostly to get a feel for the genre beyond the presumptions I was already making. So I did want I guess anyone else would do, and typed ‘steampunk’ into my kindle search engine to see what it spat out at me.

Of course if you do that you get a lot of randomness, among the randomness one book jumped out at me, Shelley Adina’s Lady of Devices. Partly because it was the first of a clearly successful series which at the time was six or more books. (now its seventeen books long and Shelley has several other successful multi book series as well, frankly its just an intimidating body of work…).

I read several of Shelley’s magnificent devices books over the course of a couple of months, as well as a lot of other steampunk novels (many of which were so forgettable I can’t really remember them). Shelly Adena’s novels however stuck in the mind. I doubt any reader would see a direct connection between them and Hannibal’s modern age steampunk. Though I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a little of Adina’s Claire Trevelyan in my Eliza ‘Maybe’ TuPaKa.

Claire Trevelyan and the other characters in Adina’s novels are the reason Shelly’s books stuck with me when others have been forgotten. They were complex, intricate, fully realised characters with motivations and feeling that that feel real, something many of the other steampunk novels I read didn’t have. Some steampunk writers have a bad habit of putting all their thought into setting and too little into character. There are a bunch of stock steampunk characters that less talented authors tend to use, the crop up more often than elven archers and axe wielding dwarves in fantasy. Shelly’s characters are never one dimension stock characters which is why they sit in the mind. You cheer them on, fear for them and wish them well, because they are real.

All of this brings me back to the reason for this post. Which was simply I bought Shelley’s latest novel on a whim, (because for some reason we are both part of the same Facebook group)and fell back in love with her characters.

The Clockwork City by Shelley Adina

Lady Georgia Brunel and her maiden Aunt Millicent are both women of a certain age, which is refreshing in of itself, in a genre full of ‘talented girls’ and ‘feisty young women’. A year after being widowed, which sounds like it was something of a blessing, Lord Brunel, Georgia’s adult son, has packed off his mother and aunt off on an extended tour of Europe, which is why they take a small villa on a side canal in Venice, with the intent of attending a few social functions and learning to paint water colours.

There are worse ways to get over a brutally bad marriage, than touring the most beautiful city’s Europe painting all day and going to social functions on an evening. And a month in Venice (a different Venice, where the islands move by giant clock workings designed by Leonardo DiVinci) makes perfect sense as a starting point… Which it would have been if not for the dead body of a British diplomat being discovered on the water steps of the villa, the morning after Georgia begrudgingly danced with him at a ball…

Things get hastily get complicated from that point onwards. The dead mans daughter fall in to the care of the ladies, her mother can not be contacted. The police suspect Lady Brunel of foul play, and Venician politics is a dark web of intrigue, kidnappings, assassins and plots that entangle the ladies at every turn.

For all the complicated plot, dark dealings and murky goings on, there is a gentleness about this novel, or perhaps a genteelness about it. The world may be full of blaggard’s, but it is also one on manners and gentle heroines trying to do whats right, because its the right thing to do. The main character are beautifully realised, and a delight to spend time with.

The complimentary characters are equally carefully fashioned, the ladies gondolier for example, is a quiet but quietly heroic fellow doing what he must to look after his charges. He and his extended family are the soul of Venice, while the politicians are disreputable, they represent the real Venetians who strive to make each day a good one.

Also, in this alternative, clockwork city, that changes every few days, there are kraken in the canal’s. Surprisingly friendly karken, of which I greatly aprove.

This is a delightful read, it keeps you turning pages, as it gently moves along, and then makes you turn them as things start to go badly for our two heroines. Because when things go bad, they go down hill quickly. And once that starts happening it hard to put the book down as you care about the characters, which is the real strength of the novel. It makes you care.

A small aside…

Generally, as those who read these blogs often will be aware, I only review small press independent writers and the self-published. I was genuinely surprised when I got to the end of this novel to realise this was a small press independently published book published by Shelley Adina’s own imprint.

As someone who spent an awful lot of time learning to professionally typeset, I find it delightful to come across a indie book as wonderfully typeset as this one. So many of them unfortunately aren’t. I read one recently that didn’t even have justified text which ruined a perfectly good read to an extent. This book on the other hand is better typeset and presented than most big publishers paperbacks.

I heartily recommend it, and also heartily recommend anyone self publishing to get a copy just to see how small independent publishing should be done…