I received an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Cogheart is a story of a very brave girl who teams up with a boy who becomes brave, as well as a mechanical fox and some other mechanical helping characters. It's a real steampunk story with cogs and machines and robots who feel like people. There's also a female air pirate/journalist who is awesome.

This story is adventure-packed and relatively fast-paced. I liked the main characters, especially Lily, and I liked her love for machines, and that in the end she was allowed to learn what she wanted even if the interests weren't considered feminine.

Still, ultimately I found this story... too bleak, if that makes sense. It does have a happy ending and a happy epilogue, but there's also a lot of death and some quite gory scenes. I'm not saying it's inappropriate for a middle grade novel really, because I don't want to patronise kids, but it wasn't as lighthearted and fun as I expected from the cover and blurb.