A highly imaginative debut with lyrical prose that occasionally hits one too many flat notes to really shine, this is not the novel I expected to get from a glance at it's cover. While the concepts intrigue, this is like being presented with great looking feast to find all the meat is dry and the deserter is merely spun-sugar floss. Pretty, but no real substance. I think we could have done with less lyrical pros gimmickry to get at the heart of the story, which is what matters in the end. All the technical tricks and lyricism in the world won't save an empty story, and sadly, I don't think this one delivers.

Not bad, but not good. Hopefully she'll work on giving us more actual information next time and less poetry-in-prose descriptions and tricks. There's definitely a story in here, and I wanted to know it-- but by the end I was finishing it simply to finish it and be done. Not bad enough to abandon, but not good enough to recommend to all but the most dire-in-need steampunk fans. ( )

Mechanique is the story of a circus in another world, a world that's been at war for hundreds of years, and a circus filled with mechanical people who cannot die. Various despots in the countries where the circus works envy the circus its mechanical, deathless people, and want to discover how the magic works.

The characters are compelling and original, the writing is lovely, the plot is utterly unusual and unique. There are no world-saving schemes, no messiahs, no saviours, no quests, no war between Good and Evil--just a collection of very strange people making something beautiful in an ugly world. I read it in a morning. Well worth picking up--even if you think you don't like fantasy novels. ( )

This book won't be for everyone, and everything I loved - the terse and taut writing style, the ruthless characterisation, the unflinching slow collision of tragedies and unravelling of mysteries - might be something others don't like. True for everything, and I really did love this.

It's about belonging and being outside, it's about refuge and sacrifice, it's about wanting and about refusing... it's about loving someone so hard and for so long that you no longer see them, and hating someone so closely that you need them. And it's all delivered with the elegance of poetry, or performance, but no airy-fairy nonsense. The language is picked for punch and the author does not care to hide behind polysyllabic show-off words (...unlike me :D).

But it lingers, and well after I closed the final page, I'm still thinking about the story, the themes, the characters. And that is the real mark of something strong and enduring. ( )

Deeper than expected.. still doesn't beat out Something Wicked or Night Circus (who knew I'd like so much circus fiction? {I dislike clowns... very much.})
I want to watch Carnevale again. ( )

An intriguing novel driven by the conflicts of the characters and the secrets of the mysterious circus that binds them together.

The characters never really stuck for me, but they are mostly just vehicles to move the conflict forward. Given the number of people in a circus, Valentine does well to give each character just enough of a feature to pin them into the story without having to flesh out a deep and reasonable psychology.

Overall, a good take on the steampunk genre, with a good variety of twist and variation to make the tired tropes of cogs and brass into something new and interesting. ( )