Book Review: Clockwork River by J.S. Emery

A sister searches for her missing brother as a new power rises amid the splendour and the squalor of a once great city.

Lower Rhumbsford is a city far removed from its glory days. On the banks of the great river Rhumb, its founding fathers channelled the river's mighty flow into a subterranean labyrinth of pipes, valves and sluices, a feat of hydraulic prowess that would come to power an empire. But a thousand years have passed since then, and something is wrong. The pipes are leaking, the valves stuck, the sluices silted. The erstwhile mighty Rhumb is sluggish and about to freeze over for the first time in memory.

In a once fashionable quarter of the once great city, in the once grand ancestral home of a family once wealthy and well-known, live the last descendants of the city's most distinguished engineer, siblings Samuel and Briony Locke.

This is a curious book. It isn't Steampunk - more Hydropunk. A world where vast stores of water pulse their way through tubes, powering a clockwork city.

I'll be honest, I struggled with it. It is ambitiously long - over twice the length of a normal novel. The sentences sometimes drift on interminably - with nary a semicolon in sight. I consider myself well read - but I felt like every other page I was calling up my eReader's dictionary to see what some archaic word meant. That's fun at first, but quickly becomes tedious. Every sentence gave the impression of being run through a thesaurus twice.

There's an awful lot of world building going on. Clockwork, and locks, and ghosts, and "regency" debutantes falling in love, and impoverished nobility, and politics, and magic... it just goes on and on. I found it quite exhausting to keep up with all the different sub-plots, minor characters, and humorous asides from the narrator.

But is it any good...?

Big books like this need a big sweeping plot to drive things along. And this, sadly, doesn't. A quarter of the way through I felt like the plot wasn't really going anywhere. There were so many diversions and tributaries that it was hard to sustain the momentum of the plot. For all the talk about it being "hydropunk" there was very little discussion about what that meant and how it had shaped the world. I wasn't expecting a thesis on how a hydraulic city could work - but there's little more than "things run on a water and some people can do magic" and that was it!

I think this may have worked better as several different books - each following a character along the Clockwork River. A book just focused on the inept magical learning of a debutante, for example, would have been a smashing read. Instead it's muddled in with half a dozen other stories.

It's rare that I don't finish a book. But by the time I got a third of the way through, I was tired from keeping every plot straight in my head and, frankly, a little bored. So I've set it aside in the vague expectation of finishing it once I've read every other book on my list.

If you enjoy long and convoluted books filled with protracted and labyrinthine sentences, and are prepared to muster up the courage to look up old-fashioned words - be they ever-so frequent - then you may (if the stars align) find this a worthwhile endeavour for your librocubicularist tendencies.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. The book is released in October 2021.