Blog Tour | A Clockwork River

Hello everyone, I am super excited to be a part of the A Clockwork River blog tour today! Thank you to Head of Zeus for inviting me to join, and for sending me a finished copy to read and review!

A sister searches for her missing brother as a new power rises amid the splendour and the squalor of a once great city.

Lower Rhumbsford is a city far removed from its glory days. On the banks of the great river Rhumb, its founding fathers channelled the river’s mighty flow into a subterranean labyrinth of pipes, valves and sluices, a feat of hydraulic prowess that would come to power an empire. But a thousand years have passed since then, and something is wrong. The pipes are leaking, the valves stuck, the sluices silted. The erstwhile mighty Rhumb is sluggish and about to freeze over for the first time in memory.

In a once fashionable quarter of the once great city, in the once grand ancestral home of a family once wealthy and well-known, live the last descendants of the city’s most distinguished engineer, siblings Samuel and Briony Locke.

Having abandoned his programme in hydraulic engineering, Samuel Locke tends to his vast lock collection, while his sister Briony distracts herself from the prospect of marriage to a rich old man with her alchemical experiments. One night Sam leaves the house carrying five of his most precious locks and doesn’t come back…

As she searches for her brother, Briony will be drawn into a web of ancestral secrets and imperial intrigues as a ruthless new power arises. If brother and sister are to be reunited, they will need the help of a tight-lipped house spirit, a convict gang, a club of antiques enthusiasts, a tribe of troglodytes, the Ladies Whist Club, the deep state, a traveling theatrical troupe and a lovesick mouse.

Epic, rollicking and in love with language, Jacob and Sara Emery’s sprawling debut novel of humble kitchen magics and awe-inspiring civil engineering is a rare and delicious commodity – the world’s first hydropunk novel.

I was super intrigued by this novel, I’m a huge fantasy lover as we all know, but I couldn’t resist a book labelled as ‘the world’s first hydropunk novel’. I was imagining a city fully powered by water, with rivers for travelling and pipes everywhere. In this respect the novel did not disappoint! The city and its infrastructure are described in great detail (at times perhaps too much detail) and the layout is imaginative and unique. I enjoyed the descriptions and explanations of how things worked in the city.

This novel is a brother and sister writing collaboratively, and I don’t think it was very obvious from reading it that two collaborators had written it together. Unlike some novels I’ve read with two writers where the division is very obviously, the whole novel flowed with no obvious breaks and changes in style.

We follow a number of stories within this novel, including the adventures of both siblings, and I felt that the number of perspectives in this novel diluted the story for me. Instead of following the adventures closely, giving us a good insight into both characters and keeping the plot moving quickly, the number of perspectives slowed the plot down considerably, and made this novel quite a length. I did enjoy all the content in the book, but I feel that it would have been more enjoyable with some content removed!

I liked the characters in this novel, especially the siblings and their relationship with each other and other characters in the novel. I thought the characters were well developed, we got a great insight into all characters, including those who only had small bit-parts in the novel. The novel has periods of extreme action where the narrative seems to move at 100 mph, then some parts are just so slow. Huge paragraphs of descriptions and unnecessary explanations from characters definitely slowed the novel and the reading experience for me.

Overall I really enjoyed A Clockwork River, it was a fascinating and well-crafted fantasy novel! I do think it could’ve been cut slightly, it is rather long, but I did get swept away in the narrative! Its a quirky read which introduced me to hydro-punk, a descriptor I really like!

Thank you to Head of Zeus again for inviting me to be a part of this awesome blog tour!

Buy the book from Bookshop.Org here (*affiliate link*)

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