16 year old Tessa Grey is arriving in Southampton from New York on board the steamship the Main. Her American aunt, leaving her alone and Tess is more than ready to be reunited with her brother Nathan at the docks and travel with him to their new home in London. He is not there to meet her and she goes willingly with the strange people sent to meet her on his behalf, but they are not benign. Kept prisoner by the sinister Dark Sisters she is forced to undergo changes that drive her to the edge of madness. At last she is rescued in a shower of rubble by two strange boys her own age and pitched into a world where magic and the supernatural live alongside and unseen by 'normal' people.
A great steampunk evocation of Victorian London with a supernatural twist, very well written and plotted. Any book that opens with the lines. 'London. April 1878. The demon exploded in a shower of ichor and guts' is going to get my attention, but Clare kept me gripped beyond for the full 472 pages of this book. Mostly written from Tessa's point of view, Clare never loses the pace of the plot but also deftly handles the compelling developing relationships between the characters of her book in a way that is commensurate with the mores and conventions of society at the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment