From the publisher: An
ingenious new thriller that weaves a path through history, following a race of
human-like machines that have been hiding among us for untold centuries.
The main characters in The
Clockwork Dynasty are June, a young human woman who researches mechanical
antiquities, and Peter, an automaton or avtomat (a Russian word that means both
“automatic” and “machine”). Peter has a “sister,” another avtomat, who looks
like a doll but is determined, intelligent and logical.
The world building in The
Clockwork Dynasty is amazing. It opens with June exploring a mechanical doll,
which pulled me in right away as a doll collector. The story covers the lives
of the two avtomats and others like them across continents and millennia. June
gets dragged into an avtomat civil war against her will, but she has the
knowledge and skills to alter the course of something that has gone on for thousands
of years. I would describe the book as a sort of steampunk mystery. Why are the avtomats fighting? It was
refreshing to read a book that didn’t dwell on a romantic trilogy – or any
romance for that matter.
Wilson does a great job of painting images throughout the
book. There are many little believable details about the construction of the automatons.
Wilson draws them in such a way that they felt both real and inhuman to me. I
felt I came to know Peter and his sister Elena better than the human June. The
narrative jumps between Peter’s past and June’s present, but not in a way that
seemed at all confusing.
The Clockwork Dynasty
is not a perfect book – parts of it were a bit slow, and a lot of questions
remained after I finished it. But I very much enjoyed this unusual read. The Clockwork Dynasty is available at
the Galesburg Public Library as a print book and an audiobook, and it will be
available as an ebook shortly.
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