I was curious about The Wickwire Watch, having read some of the reviews when it was entered in the SPFBO competition a couple of years ago, so when I saw the Kindle version was on sale for 99c, I grabbed it!
The book is a young adult fantasy, and it has many elements loved by that audience, including a plucky young protagonist with a funny name: Inkwell Featherfield, whose exact age is never disclosed. Possibly an orphan, he has become a talented thief who wears a top hat and brings to mind echoes of Charles Dickens’ character The Artful Dodger. The world he inhabits is a Victorian/gaslamp fantasy world with two different races, humanlike Cassrians and godlike, magic-wielding Entrians. There are also invisible, malicious entities known as Spektors, who Cassrians are unable to see.
The story begins with a murder mystery, involving a Colonist, Mr Bash, which I found highly engaging, and the book’s first sentence is brilliant:
“Had Mr. Bash known this was the night he was going to die, he would have stayed at home.”
Way to grab your audience and get them fully invested quickly! The first few chapters unfold at a fast pace, and the main characters are introduced without too much information being dumped on the reader.
Unfortunately, after about a quarter of the book, the pace slows down as Ink finds himself among a notorious and wrongly feared group of Cassrians known as the Colonists, whose usual daily activities were gardening and maintenance of their home. As Ink gets to know his companions, there is not enough action. From this point onwards, I found my interest dropping off and waiting for something more exciting to happen to liven things up.
The worldbuilding of this novel is imaginative, and the Spektors are suitably horrifying when we finally learn more of them. There was not enough page time dedicated to them in the book for my liking. The Wickwire watch of the title does not play a central role in the book and feels shoe-horned in for no real reason. I imagine it must become more necessary to the plot in the following books in this series. A better title for this novel would have been along the lines of The Adventures of Inkwell Featherfield.
I found the ending somewhat unsatisfactory as book two is set up without any real cliffhanger, so I don’t feel any sense of urgency to seek it out to read it. On the whole, I found the prose of The Wickwire Watch to be well-written with imaginative worldbuilding, interesting characters and scary antagonists, but disappointing overall.
