The Wonder Engine by T. Kingfisher: review

4/5 stars on Goodreads

The Wonder Engine by T. Kingfisher

I recently discovered T. Kingfisher’s (Ursula Vernon) adult fantasy and became an instant fan. I started with Paladin’s Grace, an excellent fantasy romance, and proceeded to read the Clockataur War duology that began with Clockwork Boys and concluded in The Wonder Engine.

The two books are perhaps best reviewed together, as they form one story and are told in very uneven parts, with the latter book being perhaps three times as long as the first. They’re set in the same world as Paladin’s Grace, a fairly generic pre-industrial land of city-states with their own rulers and constant wars. Gods are aplenty and they’re very hands-on and real for their paladins, but there are also mechanical inventions and non-human creatures.

Anuket City has declared a war to the Capital, and this time they’re attacking with monstrous clockwork engines that are indestructible. An army of them is marching over the mountains and it’s only a matter of time before they reach the Dowager’s city. After exhausting all options, the ruler sends out a team of criminals. There’s Slate, a forger who’s fled Anuket City a few years earlier after angering the local crime lord. Brennan is an assassin and Slate’s former lover. And Caliban is a former paladin for Dreaming God who was possessed by a demon he was supposed to slay and butchered a bunch of nuns. They’re joined by Learned Edmund, a scholar in search of a colleague who went to study the Clockwork Boys and disappeared. They form a very uneven group, but during the journey to the Anuket City, they become a team—of sorts. The first book ends when they reach the city, rather abruptly.

The second book finds the group trying to learn where the Clockwork Boys come from and how to destroy them. The first half of the book is a tad slow, but it picks up pace at half-point, when the crime lord Slate had betrayed finds her. From there it’s constant action until the mission is completed.

I really liked these books, despite the unevenness and slowness. The characters grew and changed a lot during their mission and I came to like all of them. Even Learned Edmund who seemed insufferable at first turned out to be a compassionate young man with keen eye to smaller creatures among them. There was a love story too, between Slate and Caliban, but it was secondary to the mission, and I liked how the mission and the events of the final battle affected it. The ending made me wish there were more books in the series about the adventures of Slate and Caliban, but I’ll settle with follow-up books to Paladin’s Grace.