Mission: Books 14/25
A Book With Non-Human Characters: The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia
Mattie, an intelligent automaton skilled in the use of alchemy, finds herself caught in the middle of a conflict between gargoyles, the Mechanics, and the Alchemists. With the old order quickly giving way to the new, Mattie discovers powerful and dangerous secrets - secrets that can completely alter the balance of power in the city of Ayona. This doesn't sit well with Loharri, the Mechanic who created Mattie and still has the key to her heart - literally.
The cover drew me to this book, which seems to happen a lot when I'm browsing. I'm a sucker for an interesting cover. But the synopsis sounded interesting too, so I picked it up.
I really liked this book. It's set in a steampunk city, slowly sliding towards a revolution, but there are undercurrents of plot concerning monstrous experiments, the slow extinction of a species, alchemy and strange, impossible, mechanical machines. And how all of those things fit into the world. I really liked the world-building. It all felt believable, and interesting, and occasionally tragic. I liked that Mattie's pov is a little naive, but sometimes aware that it's naive, and the reader gets so much more from her interactions and investigations than Mattie herself. No one in this book is really painted as a villain, almost everyone is human, some of them do terrible things, but in a messy, human sort of way.
I think it's always hard when you have a mechanical pov character, especially in a pre-computer society. If you make them too robot-like then you risk losing something in their interactions with others, their experiences. But if they come across as almost indistinguishable from human then you start questioning how this was accomplished with cogs and gears. How sentient/emotional can you make a mechanical being so they still feel like they fit? Or do you just go..eh magic?
Honestly, this book made me mostly overlook it, because I got attached to Mattie, and her quest to be her own person. She very much knows she's a machine, and all her limitations. She sometimes feels shame for the things she can't do, for her differences. But you can also feel how much she enjoys who she is, and how much she wants. The author did a good job making me care about her quest to reclaim her winding key. I wanted her to choose her own future, but I absolutely understood her extraordinarily complicated relationship with Loharri.