Review: The Girl and the Clockwork Cat
The Girl and the Clockwork Cat by Nikki McCormack
My rating: [rating=1]
Summary:
Feisty teenage thief Maeko and her maybe-more-than-friend Chaff have scraped out an existence in Victorian London’s gritty streets, but after a near-disastrous heist leads her to a mysterious clockwork cat and two dead bodies, she’s thrust into a murder mystery that may cost her everything she holds dear.
Her only allies are Chaff, the cat, and Ash, the son of the only murder suspect, who offers her enough money to finally get off the streets if she’ll help him find the real killer.
What starts as a simple search ultimately reveals a conspiracy stretching across the entire city. And as Maeko and Chaff discover feelings for each other neither was prepared to admit, she’s forced to choose whether she’ll stay with him or finally escape the life of a street rat. But with danger closing in around them, the only way any of them will get out of this alive is if all of them work together.
Review:
(I got a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.)
I had good expectations for this story (a street thief, victorian/steampunkish setting, part-mechanical cat), but in the end, it won’t leave me with a lasting impression, unfortunately.
The daughter of a prostitute and one of her unnamed customers, Maeko hit the streets after her mother got in debt, trying to help her pay it back as well as she could, but also resenting her. She made her way as a pickpocket and burglar, thanks to her nimble fingers and lithe body, and because she was street-savvy enough. That is, until the beginning of the novel, for at some point I thought she was not as clever as she was supposed to be. Some of her reactions seemed logical, but some of her other actions were too naive. (For instance, when she had to keep something from an enemy, she went back to a certain place, saw that said enemy had located it, too… yet she still went there to hide her package. The natural thing to do would have been to think “this place is compromised, he might not have believed what they told him, and come back later with more people.” At least that’s what “street rat thinking” should be for me.)
The setting itself is an alternate London divided between the Literati (the “modern society” and its police) and the pirates (those who openly don’t approve); the kids who fall between those are doomed to a life in an orphanage, reform house or work house, or to a life on the streets. Mostly we see this world through Maeko’s eyes, so of course everything couldn’t be developed, but it would’ve been better in my opinion if she had had just a little more interest in what happened around her, or if other characters had been there to give more information about that society. Some do… just not enough. This setting screams for more, having more to say about itself, without any room to do so.
The romance part was unneeded, a love triangle dumped out of nowhere on those poor characters. All it did was to make Maeko blush and blush and blush again and again. It quickly became old and tiring, and did not bring anything to the story. At least Maeko realised there was no time to think about boys in her predicament. On the downside, she had those thoughts fairly often, which created a tiresome cycle: “I think I like him. But I must not think about that now. But I think I like him. But I don’t have time to worry about this now.”
I wasn’t too impressed with the plot, which consisted mostly in two/three characters looking for people (the same people every time). Just like Maeko’s thoughts and blushing, it became repetitive after a while: locate people, see they’re already in someone else’s hands, realise they’re in no position to help them escape, retreat/get pursued by the police or detective, hide, rinse and repeat. I really wished the plot types would have been more varied.
The writing was all right, though a bit redundant and “telly” in places (especially when Maeko’s thought process was concerned).
The ending: if this is a standalone, then it deserved a better one, a proper one, that would wrap up everything, not just leave the reader to imagine “it probably happened like that”. If it wasn’t, it’s still a sort of cliffhanger, but one that doesn’t offer that many promises of revelations in a second book.
In the end, there were grounds for good things here, but those weren’t enough to make me enjoy the story.