By sheer coincidence, I'm reviewing two YA steampunk novels this month that boast heroes living on floating islands, my planned Arizona book for June and one submitted for review. Both are fun but they're also both clearly beginnings. The other one, the first in 'The Falconbone Chronicles' by Philip Ligon, is longer at five volumes and seems to be more grounded in as realistic a setting as a steampunk novel set on a floating island can be. This one, however, which is the first book in 'The Spinelight Saga', wraps up its episode arc better within what I expect to be a broader series arc.

At first glance, this is a lovely edition. It features a lovely logo, a nice layout, a careful font choice. There is use of AI in the artwork, which I had suspected from the cover, but not in the writing. This came out as recently as 2024 and I wonder if Honeyed Lion Press is revisiting their artwork policy. The interior design is thoughtful and occasionally playful. If we hadn't realised that this was YA to begin with, surely the change in the size of font during the ringing of an alarm bell underlines it in no uncertain fashion.

We're with the Burly family, who are the traditional nuclear setup of mum, dad, boy, girl but they are enhanced through superior engineering to include a set of annimatonn animals. Dad is Ren, a welcome nickname for Iranaeus, and he's the genius behind these transforming creations. Mum is Penelope, who provides the metal her husband needs for his work by spinning light with her loom, the closest this gets to the fairy tale side of fantasy. Elder daughter is Athena, who's following in her father's footsteps, and younger brother is Thaddeus. Most of this book is told through them.

They live on the floating island of Tiber, which seems to be a decent-sized city, maybe not quite at the level of James Blish's 'Cities in Flight' but on similar grounds without ever leaving a planetary atmosphere. Every year, it needs to descend to the ground on Landing Day to get vital supplies of water out of Lake Ancora, but otherwise appears to be self-sufficient. Its only ongoing problem is the periodic swarms of darklings that plague the city and prompt whoever's on sentry to defend it rather like a mediaeval castle.

I mentioned annimatonns and, with light looms providing the metal Tiber's industrial needs, even if it takes a while—"The light that can be spun into a pound of bronze can be spun into an ounce of silver. The light that can be spun in a pound of silver could be spun into an ounce of gold."—Ren is able to create marvels like Vox, Socrates and Argus, respectively a copper fox, a bronze otter and a tungsten wolf. While these are primarily clockwork, he builds in sophisticated speech capability and artificial intelligence, even the ability to transform. They can turn into hats at, well the drop of one, whenever they need to hide. Vox can even become a hand cannon.

There's your setup, but there's one crucial detail to come. Ren goes out during the latest darkling swarm for duty on the sentry and he doesn't come back. He's fallen and Argus is damaged, which is enough to prompt a constant barrage of suitors, each of whom seeks Penelope for her beauty and light loom skills, albeit for different reasons, and each of whom is happy to threaten her children. Quite frankly, beyond the lapse of decorum in going about this so quickly, this surely has to be the most believably Victorian that this book gets. And there's another flaw to their arguments. Soon enough, Vox receives a signal from the surface, suggesting that Ren is alive.

Now, Penelope can't go on the inevitably dangerous rescue mission, because she's pregnant, so it falls to her kids to embark upon this risky venture. Well, Athena and Thaddeus, plus Vox and Socks. Of course that rhyme was coming! They make it down to the surface, though they're attacked on the way by dusklings who prompt them to crash into trees, but they're OK and their quest begins. It becomes episodic at this point, as they encounter one community in one place and have to find the appropriate way to deal with it before moving onto the next, every step guided by a compass built into Vox that points straight at Ren's signal.

And I'll mostly shut up at this point. We're still pretty early on, just fifty pages in, and we can see the template unfolding. There are a few mistakes on the part of the publisher, but not many, just the occasional missing period or backward smart apostrophe. There's a misplaced apostrophe at one point that changed the meaning of a sentence and so, for a while, I though the island of Tiber was a skyship. It isn't. Any other problems are the responsibility of the author but there aren't a lot to talk about. Occasional decisions that some might see as flaws are deliberate choices and so become a matter of taste.

For instance, I liked the annimatonns from the outset, though I never liked that spelling, with its unexplained double Ns. I was fine with their vocabulary and intelligence, even though these such are anomalous on Tiber. I got the impression that Ren isn't the only creator of such creatures but his genius seriously outstrips that of his peers. We learn just how much when we finally get to him on the surface to discover that he's used his spare time to build a bear annimatonn out of scrap. I was less sold on their ability to transform, because everything here is theoretically explainable in scientific terms; there's no magic. And clockwork is so incredibly hard to transform.

There's also a battleground mindset that only manifests occasionally but often at the most crucial moments. For instance, they've been kidnapped by the Mighty Tree Runners, a collection of boys who have banded together for safety, and their freedom relies on Vox beating Gilgamesh in single combat. Vox, as you'll recall, is a little copper fox. Gilgamesh is a giant gorilla. I couldn't help but see this scene as 'Peter Pan' playing 'Pokémon', which, to be honest, may have been the vibe that Coulter was going for but which is hard to avoid if he wasn't. Later, we learn that this mindset has deep roots within the culture on Tiber too, with a huge arena for annimatonn battles.

I liked this and it's an incredibly easy book to like, especially if you have any sort of background in steampunk and have always wanted a clever and useful brass animal companion of your own. I've wanted that since I watched 'Clash of the Titans' in 1981 long before steampunk gained its name. Some of the episodes on the ground are more successful than others and some venture into dark territory, not least what dominates the marsh known as Leviathan's Grave. Quite honestly, that seems freaky for adult fiction, let alone children's! And, while it's all good heroic stuff, there's no karmic end for the threatening suitors and I found that I really wanted to read that.

Maybe it'll be the first item on the agenda in book two, 'The Child Throne', which fortunately I've got waiting right here to dive into next month. ~~ Hal C F Astell