A Knack for Metal and Bone by Kim McDougallMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I don't see nearly as much steampunk fiction these days as I used to a decade ago; the tide seems to have ebbed on it. I enjoy it when it's done well, though - which it rarely is, though this one, I'm glad to say, is largely an exception.
We're on a future post-apocalyptic Earth, it turns out through bits and pieces of backstory doled out in relevant moments rather than in infodumps (good). The eruption of magic six centuries ago filled the world with dangerous monsters. This apparently happened in the 21st century, based on how long ago Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is said to have been written. Much technology was lost, but some of it is now being reconstructed in a new way, using magical power sources. I love a good alternative tech tree based on magic, and this was a big plus for me. I'll note that I wouldn't have picked the book up if I'd known it was post-apocalyptic, since I don't usually enjoy that genre. However, it was far enough post-apocalyptic that it was effectively a secondary world in most respects.
The characters are a bunch of military misfits on a suspicious mission to investigate why a science station out in the Meadows (where the monsters are) has suddenly stopped communicating. There's a princess, which almost put me off - I can't stand princesses as a rule - but she's not at all princessy; she's a mechanic with a magical-technology arm and a mech familiar that turns from a bird into a mouse, all of which is cool. She's not a kid, either. She's 28. And there's a werewolf, also not one of my favourite tropes, but he also has an interesting backstory: he killed his incompetent general to keep his whole unit from being killed. Shifters are discriminated against, so he's in more trouble for being one than for killing the general.
Even though there's a large group of characters in the troop and most of them are introduced at once, I quickly got to be able to distinguish them, which is well done by the author. Most of the minor characters don't have much more than a couple of quirks and a role, but that's fine. The two main characters, who have a relatively slow-burn romantic attraction, have some depth to them, some of which is given in backstory references and flashbacks.
It's relatively well edited for a steampunk book, which are usually awful and full of vocabulary issues. There are a few notable glitches, though. The most common is the good old "let's eat Grandma" error (missing commas around terms of address), but there are a couple of misplaced apostrophes for plural nouns, missing question marks, and a few instances of sloppy typing around the end of a sentence (double period, no period, missing closing quotation mark). Numbers that are not between twenty-one and ninety-nine get hyphens they shouldn't have. There are a couple of vocab errors, but they're not frequent. I marked about 70 issues, which is two or three times the average for most books, but for a steampunk book is not terrible.
The most obvious worldbuilding mistake, which doesn't actually affect anything, is that the author seems unclear on how midnight works. Even in the far north (this appears to be former Canada, based on the wildlife, but a globally warmed version), even in the middle of summer, no matter how short the day is, the sun will never set after midnight. Midnight is the midpoint of the night - you know, the dark bit. It comes after sunset and before sunrise, roughly halfway between the two.
I did also wonder, though, how the city fed itself, given that the river and the plains were both full of monsters, and so not conducive to farming or fishing. Also, how an artificial limb fitted the princess both when she was a child and when she was an adult. And why so many contemporary references (like "didn't get the memo" or "harlequin" or the way people were named) had survived six hundred years of disruption and change. And why, now they had a magical power source which would be capable of driving it, nobody had brought back flight technology.
It's hovering on the border of the Bronze (lowest) and Silver (solid) tier of my annual recommendation list, but I think on balance it falls into high Bronze. Definite issues, both with the editing and the worldbuilding, but some good bones, strong character work and a compelling story.
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