Dear Goodreads,
Will you please implement a half star system? This was not a three star book because what it was trying to do pushes it easily into four stars, but it somehow doesn't quite seem to achieve what it sets out to do. (Bow before me, for I am the queen of the vague review).
In certain respects, Brennan's book is brilliant. She has the voice of the naturalist down pat and she does 19th century British woman on an adventure with all the style and sincerity of someone who gets the Victorians and understands how to put them on paper. Her narrator, Lady Isabella Trent, is the prime example of getting character and voice right.
The plot, oddly enough, is where I think my expectations were most disappointed. If this wants to be a Victorian novel, and I do think it does, it's missing that sense for how the plot has to lock together perfectly in order to make the events seem real and as though they work. And it's not that Brennan doesn't have all the pieces there, but the way she lays them out leaves me wondering why they don't fit together as well as they should. (Trying to articulate my objections in a concrete manner is weirdly frustrating. I'm usually better than this.) It's as if she has all the tools for writing this book at her disposal, but she doesn't always deploy them in a way that works for me. So the foreshadowing is there, but it doesn't...foreshadow right (for a Victorian novel).
I think that may be my biggest objection. When someone attempts to write a Victorian novel and epically fails, I just laugh. But Brennan is only off by a little bit and that sense of the world just a bit out of skew throws me because I want it to be right. I expect it to be right.
Oh, and the pseudo-Judaism thing, which encapsulates my objections rather perfectly. I love that she chose to give Judaism a prominent place as the model religion of her pseudo-Europe. That's awesome. I'm disappointed (in someone) that I picked up on no indications from the text that the Magisterial branch of the religion was also based in Judaism. I should have noticed that. (Brennan has said this in an interview and I will take her word for it and it makes sense because she doesn't describe the break as different religions in the text, but as different sects). So either I missed the indications of a more legalistic/rabbinic Judaism, which is possible if a trifle embarrassing, or the way that Brennan tries to convey it misses somehow. That for all the interesting world that she creates and the attention to very specific kinds of detail, we don't find out enough about that world to answer out own questions about how this world came to be as it is and why. Yes, that's the problem. The world and plot seem realer to her, as author, than they do to me as reader and something of the details and the intricacies get lost on the way from her brain to mine. And I can sense their absence and I miss them.
Tl:dr - we need a 3.5 star rating and, despite everything, I hope the next book in this series is better.