Review: The Watchmaker's Daughter

The Watchmaker's Daughter by C.J. Archer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Now that I see the number of books the author has written, and how quickly, I'm a little surprised that this is not even more made-from-box-mix.

What I mean is that it's not completely constructed out of tropes, though it is fairly tropey. There's a great deal of Convenient Eavesdrop and its cousin, Accidental Discovery of Evidence. The woman doesn't actually go off alone to confront the villain with no backup and without telling anyone where she's off to and have to be rescued by the man, but there's a scene that isn't ten million miles from that trope.

I listened to an audio version, so I can't comment on the punctuation, but the author does consistently make the common error of using "may" instead of "might" in past tense narration. She also uses "posse" to mean a criminal gang, which it might conceivably mean today, but in 1890 it definitely meant a group assembled by law enforcement.

The narrator does a good job with distinguishing the character voices, and not a terrible job with the American accents; you can mostly tell they're meant to be American, and I can usually suspend my disbelief, though they don't sound like actual Americans any more than her male voices sound like actual males. She chooses an accent for the main character that's one social class too high for a small tradesman's daughter, but I think that was the right choice, in the sense that she generally comes off as one class too high to be a small tradesman's daughter (she's several times described as "gently reared"). In fact, she seems to have been photocopied from a Regency miss who's no older than 18, even though the book is supposedly set in the 1890s and she's supposed to be 28. She even carries a reticule, an accessory that went out of fashion in about 1820.

There's nothing that really locates us specifically in the 1890s, in fact; that's a decal, something we're told rather than shown. There is some evidence of a map having been consulted, but it's mostly generic Victorian London, probably derived from reading other contemporary non-British authors' books set in Victorian London, and it feels like we are several generations of copying away from anyone who has gone so far as to read anything actually written in that place and time. The story takes place more in front of scenery flats, or at best a green screen, than in a fully realized world.

The spec-fic element is also kind of ridiculous (view spoiler)[(the heroine makes clocks magic and they fight for her (hide spoiler)], which isn't compensated for by the "you can't fire me, I quit" technique (saying in the text that it's ridiculous).

Overall, average for a period fantasy, which is to say disappointing (I find most period fantasy stories fall down on at least two of the period, the fantasy, and the story, and quite often all three, plus basic mechanics). It will have an audience, but that isn't me, and I won't be reading more in the series or from the author.

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