Rating: WORTHY!
This novel is a classic example (and we've seen one or two on my blog!), of how much crap an author can feed me and still get me to like her novel - and this doesn't even get started on how ridiculously long the title is! Lady of Devices: a Steam-Punk Adventure Novel (Magnificent Devices Book 1) by Shelley Adina (Bates). In it, Claire Elizabeth Trevelyan is the daughter of Viscount St. Ives, and even at 17, she is still attending St Cecilia's Academy for Young Ladies. We meet her in a "Chemistry of the Home" class, wherein she makes something explode and is ordered to clean it up.
I found this to be completely preposterous in every measure. Even in a steam-punk novel, to pretend that a woman so highly born would be in school is stretching things beyond breaking point. We're told that nothing more of her is expected than that she will pour an elegant cup of tea (no, the daughters of viscounts do not pour their own tea, for goodness sakes!), sew a fine seam, and catch a rich husband, yet she's in school studying chemistry? To suggest, even if she were in school, that she would be learning chemistry, even 'chemistry of the home' is another ridiculous stretch, and to suggest that she would be required to clean up the mess is completely absurd!
Yes in any real world, people do these things, but in 1889, the daughter of one of the highest ranked members of the nobility doesn't do those things, so credibility was pretty much out the window from the off, even as I found myself drawn into this story. It didn't help that the Honorable Claire Trevelyan had every cliché heaped upon her from the start: spoiled noble woman who longs to get down and dirty with technology, accident-prone rule-breaker who blows things up, with a snotty bullying triplet of school-mates arrayed against her - and an eye-glass wearing female chum who supports her unconditionally? Check, check, check, and check. I was hoping for better.
Allow me to inject a brief note of clarification here. Despite having been born in Britain, I have neither respect nor time for the nobility, the peerage, or royalty. My point here is that if you're going to set your novel in Victorian England (or indeed in any other historical period or locale), you need to give at least a nod and a wink to the social and societal mores of the day (regardless of whether you agree with them) otherwise you risk undermining the credibility of your entire enterprise. Otherwise you're writing fantasy!
Claire's bullying fellow students have trope names: Lady Julia Wellesley, Lady Catherine Montrose, Miss Gloria Meriwether-Astor. Lady Julia is expecting a proposal from Lord Robert Mount-Batting? Mount-Batting? Seriously? Another irritation was the author's insistence upon adding a 'k' to the end of words ending with a 'c', so that we got 'electrick', 'kinetick, 'statick' and so on. Weird. Just weird.
The novel is set in London in 1889 when Victoria is Queen, but unaccountably, Charles Darwin's son Leonard is Prime Minister. In actual fact, the prime minister in 1889 was the Marquess of Salisbury, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil. But here, steam-power is king and anything goes, evidently.
There are some odd sentences in this novel such as "Julia, Catherine, and Claire herself were to be presented to Her Majesty during the same Drawing Room" During the same drawing room? During the same audience, you mean? Who knows? Maybe it's a phrase but it sounded weird. In another oddity, we're told that Claire's talents lie in the chemistry lab, where things have a regrettable habit of blowing up, so in what way, precisely, do her talents lie there? Is she to become an anarchist bomb-maker? Maybe. None of this made sense, although I confess that the people who write the absurd blurbs are not necessarily they who write the body of the novel.
Of course, Claire isn't going to be in this position for very long, because, as the blurb has it, her father gambles his estate on the combustion engine and loses. The coward shoots himself and off we go! Even if this were the case, however, why would Claire be out on the street? She has no relatives? I can see how "friends" would reject her and turn a cold shoulder on her plight if they had invested in the Viscount's failed petroleum scandal, but not family. Jane Austen made a career out of delivering her heroines to the less-than-tender mercies of distant relatives, so I don't know what went wrong here.
All of that said, I found myself, as I mentioned before, drawn into this and by the end of it, I was completely on board. After the very prickly start, the novel settled down and really got me interested. The events became, if somewhat improbably, more realistic, although where Claire's remarkable spine grew from, we were offered no firm guidance.
So, overall, I recommend this, believe it or not, despite the unfortunate series of annoyances, problems, and irritations. See? You can get me to continue reading - but you have to give me a story along with the headaches you inflict!
