What a great surprise! I came into reading this blind and came out seeing wonders. The world-building is a true delight, having a feel of Sanderson's old Mistborn, a touch of hardcore steampunk, but most of all: pure and distilled fantasy dystopia.

There's a lot of story going on and what's more, Pang's writing at the plain-beauty level is something to behold. I'm not just talking about the repurposed nursery rhymes, either. I'm talking about the perfectly placed and minimal placement of pure poetry right in the text where it would have the very best impact. I was a bit awed.

Make no mistake, this is a pretty epic fantasy not in terms of battles and such, but it was a core YA that centered on thieves. Magpie and Sparrow are best friends and all the downtrodden MoonChildren are at the core of a huge piece of deception and prejudice that will soon become, (I do believe,) the main story arc of the rest of the series.

There's plenty of mystery to go around, too, but it's the details and the imaginings that make this book so beautiful. There's plenty of core story elements that will be familiar to everyone, of course, but how Pang pulls it off speaks more to some serious skill than any other author's half-hearted attempts. :) This is the real stuff.

I am going to be following this series with GREAT anticipation. I can't wait to see more of this craft. :)

Oh, and thanks to NetGalley for this ARC! I love being surprised like this! ( )

When I came across this book, I rubbed my hands in anticipation. A steampunk setting with an infectious agent is right up my street.

We're taken into a well fleshed out dystopian world with the usual elements of social stratification into rich overlords, a middle tier, and those who live on the street. Main character Maggy is at the bottom of the heap, being one of the Moon Children who are so despised, even as lip service is given to the... mystic/symbolic way in which they aid society. When she stumbles upon a dead body and a clockwork dragon that takes a liking to her, her life becomes a lot more complicated.

The entire book is written from Maggy's perspective, in first person present tense. It's a PoV that normally takes me a few chapters to settle into, but I reached the end still feeling that the narrative voice was odd. This might be because the prose and vocabulary feel far more complex than we'd expect from a young street rat, so it always felt as if there was some other narrator between the reader (me, at least) and Maggy the character. Additionally, nearly every paragraph included a sentence with a participial or absolute phrase: the similar sentence structures were repeated enough that I found it distracting from the text. I noticed a couple of typos, but nothing significant.

The worldbuilding was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the little details immensely, such as surgeons tattooing a "signature" on any wounds they stitch, which has all kinds of delicious implications.

As to the story itself, Maggy ends up in all kinds of trouble, some of which she deals with, and some of which has lingering consequences, clearly leading into the sequel. We learn plenty about society and hints as to what's going on behind the scenes. Much of the story covers what Maggy learns (and how). However, I came away feeling that the book served more to introduce the scope of Maggy's challenges than as a complete story in itself. Personally, I'd have preferred to see a more distinct resolution.

If you enjoy immersive dystopian worlds, Magpie's Song is worth a look.