My main issue with this book was that it just felt very confusing. Characters' motives, the choppy, obscure dialogue, and a lot of unresolved threads or open-ended scenes left me feeling a bit disoriented in the end. For most of the book I was unsure if I was confused because I was supposed to be confused and it would resolve later or if it was just written in a confusing way. It turns out to be the latter. Mph. This was well written and I was really enjoying it. Lovely sense of time, stroppy unlikeable heroine, interesting steampunky 'science' without too much annoying airship bobbins and a great concept. But I do wish there had been a proper plot--it just kind of evaporated towards the end, leaving me with a sense that there's less to this than meets the eye. I will forever love Thaniel, Keita, Six, and Katsu. I wish there was a book three, but I can't imagine after all that happened in this that there will be. Die Grundprämisse der Geschichte ist großartig. Es spielt in London und in Japan des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts und es geht um Bombenattentate, einen englischen Telegrafisten und einen japanischen Uhrmacher, der die Zukunft sehen kann. Und einen mechanischen Oktopus, der vielleicht oder vielleicht nicht eine Seele hat. I won’t go into the plot rehashing here – it’s complicated, and I don’t want to spoil the fun of reading for the others. I’ll concentrate on the characters instead.

Having really enjoyed The Watchmaker of Filigree Street I was really looking forward to be reunited with Thaniel and Mori. I'm a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear as you are to me, I don't.” A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. This kind of writing is rampant in this book as well as the author focusing on minute details, such as how silk skirts hiss when someone wearing them walks, in favor of developing the character wearing the silk skirts. On it goes. The characters are mostly flat, bloodless, and unlikable, and they all sound alike, whether man or woman, young or old, British or Asian. Which brings me to this: there's a peppering of racial remarks throughout the book aimed at Asians and other non British persons. I'm not sure why the offensive remarks are in here, especially when everyone sounds the same and pretty much looks the same. One of the main characters, who's Asian, has bleached his hair blond and cut it very short. How very strange for a story taking place in the 1880's. I totally get why some people don't like books where they have to pay attention to every detail and have to accept that they haven't got a clue where things are going (especially if maybe it feels like the author doesn't know). I'm also usually not a super-fan of reliable narrators mostly because I'm a bit too trusting by nature and when it turns out the narrator was wrong about something I'm like 'well this plot is unbelievable obviously'. Thankfully Natasha avoids that particular pitfall by... I don't know, some kind of author-y magic? Anyway personally I love how so many little details and notes seem to just be there because they're interesting and then turn out to be super relevant. Reading anything where an author is so clearly interested in their subject is such an honest joy, and reading a book where Japan especially is written by a white person as an outsider - from the perspective of a white person as an outsider - and done with such an obvious attempt at respect and honesty is depressingly refreshing.Although the plotline unfolded in predictable manner there were so many confounding elements that I sort of lost interest in the story. Thaniel and Mori, characters I loved in The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, were rather shadows of themselves.

I particularly appreciated the realistic depiction of being a Japanese expatriate in Victorian London. Mori, alongside other Japanese characters, is routinely exposed to racist behaviour and attitudes. Grace’s story instead emphasises the way in which gender discrimination oppressed, repressed, or constrained women lives. I really hope there's another trip to come which will let the reader linger a while longer with this pair and their adopted daughter Six. I was okay with the first half because I thought answers would come later, but then I realized that the answers didn't come, or the answers did come and they were a complete let down. The bulk of this one takes place in Japan, which oddly is the source of some of my minor irritations with the book. That is not to say I noticed a bunch of historical errors or anything, honestly my history is too rusty for that. It's more just an artifact of reading conversations in English that are meant to be taking place in Japanese and having some sense of what would have been said in Japanese and the English version not matching the way I would have translated it. And of course I'm not particularly knowledgeable about Victorian English, or versed in Victorian translations of Japanese, so these could well be what someone of that period would have used, but it jarred me nonetheless. Taking events from actual history and intertwining them with the characters of Thaniel and Keito gives the reader a real sense of place, coupled with the almost mystical nature of the electrical experimentation.I love all the relationships, in fact. I love the kindness that people show to each other, even when they are being horrible. I love the sense of place and the atmospheric details.

So many side characters were not fleshed out - Vaulkner, Pringle, Suzuki, Tanaka... they felt a little 2DNatasha Pulley’s writing superpower is to make me not care about the flaws in her books. (And, yes, there always are some.) I’m generally too entranced to care about the problems. That didn’t happen with this book. Sadly, here is just another case of a pretty cover that doesn’t deliver. It may look nice on a shelf but it’s ultimately a disappointing waste of time and money. Die Autorin erklärt im Nachwort auch, dass ihre Figuren zwar fiktiv sind (fast alle), aber das einige Ereignisse durchaus in der Realität verankert sind. Politische Themen scheint sie gerne in ihren Geschichten zu verarbeiten, sowie auch einen Hauch Magie, eine Handlung als Mysterium und großartige Charakterzeichnungen. Cliss, Sarah. "Natasha holds author's event at Ely and meets up with some familiar faces" . Retrieved 2 September 2016. Under the gas lamps, mist pawed at the windows of the closed shops, which became steadily shabbier nearer home. It was such a smooth ruination that he could have been walking forward through time, watching the same buildings age five years with every step, all still as a museum”

By the end of this book, I actually feel my interest in their relationship to have waned significantly. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (hardcovered.). Bloomsbury Circus. pp.1–325. ISBN 978-1408854280. One thing I love about her way of writing is how she isn’t explicit about a great many things, but things are understood between the lines. Her writing style reflects how Mori, who can remember the future, experiences the world, in bits and pieces that may go either way depending on his own choices or that of other people’s, always changing, often in jerky motions, reacting to things before they have happened. There is also a romance, and I want to talk about something here. At one point in the book, Thaniel participates in a marriage of convenience to Grace, and when he alerts Mori of this, he thinks to himself that he is stealing years of their strangely-close-roommates relationship from him. At this point in the book they’re not in any type of relationship; they’re simply living together, but he still feels as if he has lost something in giving up this living arrangement.

thaniel put his cheek against six’s hair while he tried to think of something to say that wasn’t the truth. the truth was that he loved mori so hopelessly he could have found a way to excuse cemeteries of dead wives.” Thaniel's brief is odd: the legation staff have been seeing ghosts, and Thaniel's first task is to find out what's really going on. But while staying with Mori, he starts to experience ghostly happenings himself. For reasons Mori won't--or can't--share, he is frightened. Then he vanishes.