Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC!

2.5

I was drawn in by the description but I was let down.
The story was either rushed or felt incomplete.
The time jumps were not clear and I had to go back a few times to make sure I didn't miss anything. I do think the story has potential but it needs better execution. We need a lot more details. Also, character development was lacking. I could not connect to any character, they all fell flat, specially Ada.

It does make for an interesting read and the concept of the watch is intriguing.

The premise sounded like everything I love in a book, however, I do feel it was somewhat misleading, particularly in terms of "she must forsake the two people she loves more than herself: her captor and her adopted sister". It wasn't until the very end that I got the impression that Ada particularly cared for either person, by which point I wasn't convinced. The book had lots of potential but I found the execution lacking.


This also suffers massively from being "all tell and no show", which left me disconnected from the characters and events. As a reader I need to be inside the character's head, feeling their emotions and understanding their motivations. For those who don't need that connection, this would probably be a very entertaining read. Action scenes and conversations were fine but linking passages had no coherency or flow, leaving me wondering if minutes, hours, days, weeks or years had passed.


I never found myself immersed in a Victorian steampunk world. Those steampunk elements were minimal and felt shoe-horned in just to make the "magical watch" element credible. They were add-ons rather than imbued throughout the story and setting. I can't say I got a particularly Victorian England feel most of the time either.


The timeline also felt inconsistent, particularly during her training with the Shadow organisation. We are told Ada will have to fight hard for her place as an initiate, yet she had one scrappy fight and was suddenly in. A few days (weeks?) later, the group is shown mechanical dummies that will be imminently used for training but then we are told their first time fighting with them happens several years later. It was incredibly unclear how long Ada was in "training", none of which we saw in any real detail and most of which was talked about after the fact. Again this left me feeling very disconnected from the story. Opportunities to show events were missed time and again and whilst I enjoyed the story it never really grabbed ahold of me.

Trigger warning Child abuse.
A 19th century steampunk concept. Love the mechanical horses and dragonfly's. Took a bit for me to grasp the shadow society and understand what exactly they were doing but i got it. I admire Lady Fiona Constance and hope to see more of her. I do not have any info on if this is first in a series or a standalone, it could potentially end here but is open to more.