With panting hounds beguiled of their prey:
I finished Clockwork yesterday afternoon. It’s a good book.
It’s a short little thing, really only a novella or maybe even a short story. It’s set in a small German town, at some unspecified pre-industrial time. It begins with a discussion between an apprentice clockmaker and an young storyteller. They’re both nervous because they have something they haven’t finished, and they’re arguing over whose job is harder. The author then informs us that both storytelling and clockmaking are equally difficult and in some ways very similar, and proceeds to tell a story about clockwork which is itself like a piece of clockwork. At least, that’s the intention, and while the story is kind of cute, it doesn’t hold a candle to something like an Elmore Leonard story.
I won’t go too deep into the plot, but it involves an evil wizard/clockmaker, love saving a prince’s life and a dangerous clockwork robot who murders when triggered by a certain word. For 110 pages, it was a fun read.
Now I’m reading Elizabeth Boyer’s The Sword and the Satchel, the first in a series of 4 Tolkienesque fantasy novels.