The Iron Wyrm Affair

Excellent! Her protagonists were damaged, but nowhere near broken - Saintcrow likes to break her characters a bit too much for me, but this one worked. The descriptions, characters, dialog, and plot were Saintcrow's usual deep, rich, complex work; the setting is fascinating, a steampunk/fantasy (early) Victorian England. I actually enjoyed Clare's deductions - I usually detest Holmes-style "he has red dirt on his boots and therefore was born here and last ate dinner at this inn and...", but Clare made it work for me. And Bannon's style of magic was weird (even before she unleashed her Discipline) and amazing. The secondary characters are just as rich - and I am delighted that there's no romance subplot between the protagonists, it's so show more rare to find that. We are kind of dropped into the middle of events, but deducing what happened before is a large part of the story - the characters are trying to figure it out, too. Love it, want the next. show less

4.5/5
Leave it to Lili to venture into steampunk and make her first book the most steampunkish I've read this year. She just doesn't do anything by halves.

Unbelievable, meticulous attention to detail. Clockwork horses and altered mechanically, seedy criminals of the underworld, reincarnated Britannia in each queen of England, here be dragons, griffins... and rise and fall of sorcerous forces each dawn and dusk.

The trademark of Miss Saintcrow's writing is still here, - extremely strong main heroine, Emma Bannon, a sorceress and Prime of the most dangerous of magic, Death magic, serving the Queen herself and trying to protect her by any means possible.

Emma crushes and subjugates everything and everyone in her way, she is destructive force show more of nature, paranoid and afraid that her own warrior-protector, her magical Shield, Mikal, is ready to kill her and works beside her back.

Archibald Clare is an entirely different matter. He is not an equal partner to Emma and there is certainly no romantic spark between them. He is a mentath, a person whose brain has to find logical connections in everything, even the most minuscule parts. He is like Sherlock Holmes on crack, he will go mad if his brain is not occupied by a complicated task.

But someone is killing mentaths one by one and taking their body parts, so Emma's task is to protect Archibald and at the same time work with him on uncovering a multi-layered conspiracy which threatens the foundations of British Empire.

It's a fantastic adventure, but it took few chapters for me to get used to the overabundance of detail and pretty rigid main heroine. However, once you warm up to this book, it really gets to you. There is sly humour and well-rounded characters, - Mikal, desperate to gain his sorceress's trust, Clare, curious and analytical about everything, Ludovico, a grubby assassin, who is tasked with Clare's protection and Emma herself, whose true nature shows through her actions towards those she protects, not through her cold and ruthless talk.

I am extremely excited to know more about the world Lili created and looking forward to Emma and Archibald's further adventures. Recommended to all fans of steampunk, especially Iron Seas series by Meljean Brook, and Miss Saintcrow's writing style in general. show less

This ER ARC was waiting for me when I got home, and the cover words screaming "SORCERY! SEDUCTION! DEDUCTION!" were so demanding that I had to get it read quickly. (Note: those words are NOT on the official cover, but they are on the ARC in 1.24 inch tall letters.)

Another alternative England, this one puts together sorcery and Sherlock-Holmsian deduction to create a lively story of treachery and betrayal of the Crown. Extremely interesting world-building and equally interesting characters, this one is all action from start to finish.

Although there are some similarities to the Parasol Protectorate books, this is grittier, and there is no comedy of manners here. The steampunk characteristics of Victorian industrialism are shared, but the show more fog of Londinium in this story is more like an nasty, unsavory character. The built-in antagonism of the sorcerers and the mentaths sets up a dynamic tension right from the first. show less

Good gracious, this was fun!

More when my heartbeat goes back to normal.

Ok, brain is back to normal, or at least as normal as it ever gets around here. Let's count this off.

First, I have a lot of enthusiasm for this book, in part simply because it's the first book in a VERY long time that I picked up and just HAD to finish. This in and of itself inflates my overall enjoyment of the book, so everything else goes via that lens.

Next, I'm a Saintcrow fan, and I like how she handles phrases and characters and plot and other writerly stuff. She used some standard phrases, sort of catch phrases, that could have been annoying except that she seemed to be so consciously using them that it became shorthand. It didn't get annoying and instead gave show more some layering. So there's THAT.

Third, you'd have to be blind not to see the nod to Sherlock Holmes in this, although it is handled with a good bit of skill and finesse. This isn't a Holmes rip off translated to an alternate world and gussied up with Magick. This is decent homage, which means it steals just enough that I notice the source, but not enough to feel like a rip off.

Fourth, although these are some fairly troubled and complicated characters, there was a refreshing lack of angst! Oh the angst! and a maturity to the characters that I appreciated. They aren't STUPID and they don't suddenly do STUPID stuff, nor do they ever act without a motive that coincides with the character construction up to the point of the action. Hey, that's important. The characters aren't really presented in order to show their growth -- this is a steampunk tinged adventure, not a Bildungsroman -- but it's there in subtle touches. Even characters who were not all that competent manage to reach their own levels of competence and just don't go stupid in order to create a plot need or hook. I mean, that's good writing.

Last, speaking of subtle touches, my favorite part was how many threads of development were revealed in the tiniest bits and trailed off to be continued in later books. Lots of threads, lots of questions, lots of mysteries yet unsolved, but the primary mystery was sufficiently mysterious and that unraveling of it sufficiently gripping. The world built behind all this plot stuff was also revealed in touches and visuals -- no big fat info dumps of author notes disguised as word count.

So that's pretty much why I enjoyed the hell out of this book and have the next on preorder. show less

Wow, I have to say, I loved this book! It pulled me in quickly and kept me reading voraciously until the end. Unique characters, a fully-developed steampunk world, and a complex plot--what's not to love?

So, why only four stars? It's really a 4.5 for me. The only minor complaints I had: there's a lot thrown at the reader at the outset, and you really have to work a bit to keep up with everything that's going on and to make sense of the world and the magic system. I didn't find it a problem, but (my editor persona coming to the fore) some readers would make heavy work of it. Also, after a while I found the many internalizations of the main characters a bit wearying--just a little overdone. To be fair, the characters have a lot of secrets show more that they really can't talk about but that are integral to understanding them, so the author does need to find some device to let the reader in. It just got distracting by the end.

However, do not let these editorial nit-picks steer you away from this marvelous book! My delight in it was dampened only by the realization that I have to wait a bit yet for the next Bannon and Clare adventure. show less

This book perplexes me. There is so much about it that I love: the world is a beautiful blend of deep-rooted, inherent magic and logic-powered steampunk; the heroine is amaaaaaazing; the story twists and turns and none of its elements are over-hammered.

But there are story-telling choices that just baffle me. Ms Saintcrow seems to reliably pick the least involved of her two narrators to POV any scene, and equally reliably cuts away in the indrawn-breath moment before action breaks out, only to later relate what followed through one character telling the other about it. Most of the most exciting bits - frequently involving Emma Bannon, Sorceress Prime and total BAMF, kicking major eldritch and other arse - are told to us after the fact, show more or glossed over entirely while she staggers around in the tattered and bloody aftermath.

BAFFLED.

Especially when some of the other story-telling choices are just so right. The relationship between our protagonists (Emma Bannon and Archibald Clare, who is a thinly-skinned Sherlock Holmes, but while that bothered me to start with, he grew into himself as shenanigans proceeded) is developed quite gently and believably, while Emma has her own very present (and deliciously rendered) entanglement of the heart elsewhere. And she really is an awesome character - a strong woman struggling believably with an era that doesn't really like strong women, and the interplay of forces and expectations upon her is done so deftly. Plus she makes a zombie flying horse with the power of her mind. Booyah.

Though all of that said, one further big issue I had with things was a running point about the mentaths (the terribly smart people, of which Sherlock Clare is one) being totally unsettled and generally wilfully ignorant about sorcery. Dude, if a thing is an innate part of your universe and has been for the entirety of your civilisation, it should form part of your logical understanding of said universe, and I fail to see how it can be otherwise. It's like making a modern Sherlock Holmes who ignores science. Whut?

So I don't even know, with this book. It teetered between five beautiful stars of righteous-guitar-solo sorceressly-arse-kicking, and two stars of why-did-you-do-that-omg, so I guess I'm settling it at three and a half-ish, and scratching my head in perplexity. show less

The prologue from Archibald Clare's perspective was arresting, his visual organization of the world around him made me feel as if I could see it through his eyes. This cinematic introduction to THE IRON WYRM AFFAIR had me excited to explore their world, and I was almost disappointed to revert to the more mundane narration of the main character.

Rather than adding fantastical and steampunk elements to familiar history, Saintcrow adds a few drops of the familiar into her own witch's brew of a world. The tight restraint of her characters isn't only due to Victorian sensibilities, but also the physics that governs magic and logic in their reality. I liked how the narration passes back and forth between Clare and Emma, as the mentath's sharp show more observation and deductive reasoning filled in gaps that the recitent Emma and Mikal left blank. Emma is a typical Saintcrow heroine. Dark, dedicated, sparking with magic and bruised by a traumatic event. The violence that brought her and Mikal together is also the same thing keeping them apart, and I liked that there was more than simple class-conscious stubborness stretching out the romance.

THE IRON WORM AFFAIR is one of those books that plays vividly across the mind's eye, unfolding like a movie in all of it's fantastic and creepy detail. Clockwork horses, flying carriages, gangs of flashboys with their augmented limbs, stilted mentaths using science to impose order on the world around them even as sorcerors defy all natural laws. Saintcrow has created an ambitious new world with the Bannon & Clare series, one that I cannot wait to revisit.

While I enjoyed the way sorcery and mentaths both complimented and opposed one another, I did not anticipate a significant twist that raised the mentaths to a whole new level. The magical structure of this world is fascinating in its own right, and with intriguing characters and a hint of romance, THE IRON WYRM AFFAIR has a lot to offer fans of both steampunk and urban fantasy.

Full review to follow. show less