Put cogs and gears on everything!
A Book By A Female Author - The Iron Wyrm Affair by Lillith Saintcrow.
The game is afoot!
London's geniuses are being picked off by a vicious killer, and Emma Bannon, a sorceress in the service of the Empire, must protect the next target, Archibald Clare. Unfortunately he's more interested in solving the mystery of the murders than staying alive . . .
In a world where illogical magic has turned the Industrial Revolution on its head, Bannon and Clare will face dark sorcery, cannon fire, high treason and the vexing problem of reliably finding hansom cabs in the city.
This book looked like fun, it sounded like fun. I was expecting Morgana and Sherlock Homes solve crime! That sounded like a fun book. A mostly romance-free adventure with a victorian theme, a little like Soulless by Gail Carriger, which I quite enjoyed.
But the first thing I have to say about this book is not a compliment. It annoyed me from beginning to end. Constantly describing your adult female heroine - or any of her body parts or mannerisms - as 'little' or 'childlike' is throwing me the hell out of the book. Especially if they're observations being made by a man with any romantic interest in her. No. No. Stop it.
Emma Bannon is a bearable heroine, though at times she feels frustratingly like a collection of female protagonist tropes. I feel like we never really get to know her as much as I wanted to. Archibald Clare gets to be our pov character for alternate chapters. He seems to get the meat of the fleshing out, dialogue, interesting companions and inventive steampunk plot. The world-building has some interesting ideas, though it does jolt from alternate Victorian London with magic, to heavily steampunk-flavoured, mechanical human craziness with dragons, in a way that doesn't quite feel earned.
It's not exactly romance free - but weirdly the love interest is almost completely extraneous to the plot, he has barely any personality and no chapters from his pov. He barely does anything but look grumpy/jealous, occasionally fight things and protest the heroine doing stuff. Poor cardboard love interest. He feels like he was just stuffed in so the book had a love interest. You could cut him out of the book entirely and it wouldn't have made the slightest difference. I suspect people with no real interest in romantic sub-plots or main plots might find him an annoying diversion, and people who like to read romance will probably find the lack of it disappointing.
Honestly, the book works best when Bannon and Clare are interacting, I thought the book was better when they were together, driving the plot forwards. I would actually have read more of their adventures if Emma was fleshed out a little more, and if there was a little more for them to do, and a little less in the way of over-used urban fantasy tropes. And if they could stop talking about her little childlike face of course, because that's just weird...