Frances Hardinge is English, I believe, and this is either her first novel or the first one available in America. Oddly enough, I read a British copy of it. The cover’s a little odd, and so’s the story, for that matter. It’s definitely aimed at a middle-reader audience, though: one with a healthy sense of the macabre. The British printing also has gold touches on the cover, which unfortunately wear off onto the reader’s hands after a few readings.

Mosca Mye is born into a world that is a fictionalized version of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. There are two religions; one was the general religion of everybody, involving many little gods, their statues, and their days. The other religion was a new one, supposedly based on the teachings of the old religion, and involved birds. It caused a lot of people to fight and a lot of bloodshed, and eventually it was overthrown and the people re-adopted the old religion. Other than the religion, the world is run by a few different guilds, primarily the Stationers’ (Printers) Guild and the Locksmiths’ Guild. Politically, it’s divided up into a lot of different principalities and dukedoms, and the setting for the majority of the book is the dukedom of Mandelion. The Duke of Mandelion is a bit mad, and his sister, the Lady Tamarind, spends most of her time managing him and the rest of the country.

Anyway, Mosca is born into a soggy backwater town where the water is so hard that nearly everyone’s eyebrows are coated with white minerals. Her father, who teaches her to read despite the fact that it’s frowned upon for girls, dies when she’s eight. Mosca moves in with her aunt and uncle, but by the time she’s twelve she’s so fed up with them that she burns their factory down and hitches a ride out of town with a con man named Eponymous Clent. Clent and Mosca go to Mandelion, ostensibly because he knows people there. They get caught up, separately and together, in a political tangle involving illegally printed books, several different rulers, murder, secret schools, religion, and Mosca’s dad. There’s also a goose involved, named Saracen, who is murderous but quite good friends with Mosca.

It’s hard to be more specific with the plot, since the book is nearly 500 pages long and there’s a lot of it. Suffice it to say, the political intrigue is a lot more interesting than it looks. So many threads eventually come together in this book that there really isn’t time to be bored with any of them. It jumps around a bit, but Mosca is almost always our focus, holding it together. The occasional times that Mosca is not the object of our third-person limited narration are just often enough to be refreshing. It’s primarily an alternate history, not a fantasy; there’s no outright magic, but the world is definitely not our own.

The settings are wonderfully evocative, from the soggy city Mosca starts in to Mandelion, half of which is being torn down on the Duke’s whim. He’s recently become obsessed with symmetry and doubles and is trying to make the city match. Mosca’s eyebrows don’t grow in to match the rest of her hair until most of the way through the book.

Eponymous Clent’s elocution is possibly the most interesting part of the book, style-wise. He is a master with words and nearly everything he says ends in a flight of fancy. I’d give an example, but the copy of the book that I read is a couple hundred miles away at the moment and the internet isn’t being very accomodating. His speaking style smacks of rhetorical figures, though: alliteration, hyperbole, similes and metaphors, and the like. Mosca, at least in theory, can keep up with him, but her general speaking is closer to a fake lower-class dialect than anything as elevated as Clent’s speaking.

I believe the author was attempting to make Mosca unlikeable, by having her be a little bit self-serving, too smart for her own good, and just a bit nasty, but it didn’t work. Not for me, at least: I thought Mosca was definitely sympathetic and I liked her a great deal. Clent is perhaps a little too egotistical to be truly appealing, but he wasn’t that much worse than Mosca. Based on the short scene where he appears at the beginning of the book, I found Mosca’s father to be the least likeable, and he was almost revered by most of the characters in the rest of the book. However, Saracen is probably my favorite character, for who doesn’t love a murderous goose?

There’s a thread of the plot that deals heavily with religion: the existence of gods, what they mean to people, and whether it matters. Some of this may be too heavy or not of interest to younger readers; heavily religious parents may not approve of a line of thinking that could disprove God, but I didn’t find that this topic overwhelmed the story. Readers who would be uncomfortable with the questioning of faith may prefer to avoid the book, but I would guess that if one is so uncomfortable that one censors one’s reading heavily, one doesn’t read fantasy or science fiction that often.

This is not a book for everyone, and I’m not sure there are very many middle-grade readers who would enjoy this book. Politics aren’t generally a favorite topic, and history and religion aren’t always that high on the list, either. For perhaps older readers, especially ones who enjoy convoluted plots and linguistic flights of fancy, this has the possibility of being a very interesting, although not perhaps entirely easy, read. 4/5 stars.