I went into this book with high hopes – the blurb reads like a steampunk 19th century Paris version of Six of Crows (which I will always stan) with an exciting magic system relating to a lot of real world history, so I expected to enjoy the start of this (very attractive looking) trilogy. So, what went wrong: 

 

First, the cast of characters on paper is hugely diverse; you’ve got a several multi-racial/LGBT characters, an Indian character and a Jewish character on the autism spectrum. But it felt like so much time was spent on making the puzzles and heists of the book so clever that all the characters seem to read with the same voice and felt quite one dimensional. Speaking of voice, I realise you can take liberties in fantasy books but the dialogue was just too modern and occasionally insipid for me to take it too seriously for the time it was set in. 

 

I also took issue with some parts of the depiction of autism in Zofia – this is particularly personal for me since I feel like a lot of autistic characters often fall into the “Rainman” trope, i.e. being a maths-savant, etc. etc. which the majority of the time, is not accurate and pigeon-holes many autistic people. It’s also reasonably well-documented that girls manifest with autism quite differently and diversely to boys but the dominant stereotype/representation of autism is often how it appears in boys. Zofia’s character feels like a Wikipedia’d version of autism palatable to the masses. I will say this is all totally subjective but being an autistic woman many of these things didn’t sit well with me, but this is just my experience with the book.