![]() ![]() The ending is a bit muddled and weirdly paced, but it wasn’t enough to put me off my game. And Nimira is refreshingly clever throughout. The details are lovely, the voice consistent, the characters complex. The result is a whimsical, smart novel that is sort of like a cross between Howl’s Moving Castle and Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell. And what he is a angst-puppy trapped in cogs and springs. Instead, in a completely refreshing sequence where she doesn’t spend pages agonizing over what she really saw (a pet peeve of mine in fantasy), she gets over her shock and disbelief and settles down to business: finding out what. So when the clockwork man does his mumbling thing for her, she doesn’t go running to Mr. They claim it mumbles to them, which is admittedly terrifying, and then they run away. Parry has had some problems with retaining girls in the past as they insist the automaton is haunted. ![]() Parry wishes to retain her services to sing with a handsome automaton - a man-shaped clockwork machine that plays the piano when wound (sexy, right?). It follows Nimira, a music hall girl, a dark-skinned oddity in light-skinned Lorinar, as she leaves the security of the music hall for employment with the mysterious and dashing Hollins Parry. So begins Magic Under Glass, a debut novel by Jaclyn Dolamore (Bloomsbury, Dec ‘09). As the posters said TROUSER GIRLS FROM THE LAND OF TASSIM! We were billed just underneath the acrobats and the trained dogs. The audience didn’t understand a word we sang. ![]()
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