The Watchmaker of Filigree Street: The extraordinary, imaginative, magical debut novel

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The Lost Future of Pepperharrow is a somewhat disappointing followup to The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. Much is made of her (she is different from other women) but to me she was merely aggravating (in her insisting that Mori is evil, in blaming him for everything, in her alliance with an actual murderer). And then the end happens and all you’re left with is the desperate need to go back and live in that world all over again. Not to mention the characters you want to see together are actually separated for a good chunk of the book.

Has Thaniel become stronger after his tryst with extinction in the capital, or has he become weaker? Though it had did have some components that were interesting, overall I thought The Watchmaker of Filigree Street tried to incorporate too many different elements and ended up being a tiresome mishmash.

I don't particularly understand the Mori's-in-a-fog, medicine messed him up, he needs a sharp shock to pull him back to the present thing. As things progress, however, we move from mystery to history to (nearly) unrequited romance, a somewhat jarring shift in focus.

There is also another character, Grace, who shows up and slowly becomes a part of the book’s narrative. The Lost Future of Pepperharrow has all the mystery and eerie magical realism that Pulley's other books do.What determines what appears from thousands of years of potential ghosts, why only the most plot-relevant stuff? The whole story has an air of magic and the joy is more in exploring the characters, their attitudes and how they fit together, than the mystery plot. Lovely sense of time, stroppy unlikeable heroine, interesting steampunky 'science' without too much annoying airship bobbins and a great concept. At one point in the book, Thaniel participates in a marriage of convenience to Grace, and when he alerts Mori of this, he thinks to himself that he is stealing years of their strangely-close-roommates relationship from him. On that note let me say that even though Bedlam Stacks is a separate book, it takes place in the same universe as the Watchmaker novels, so you really really ought to not skip that one, not just because of reasons I can’t mention, but also because it’s just as lovely and adorable and touching an magical as anything else she has her hand in.

If you think of a book as the sum of its ingredients, rather like a cake from a recipe, you will already see that you probably have not seen these elements combined before, in quite this way. There wasn't as much page time as I'd expected but there was SO much more character development and I would sell my soul for good character development, especially when it's plot-crucial. And in the midst of this, Thaniel, a civil servant who excels at translating Japanese and operating a telegraph key and composing music, is dispatched to the British legation in Japan to deal with reports of ghosts wreaking havoc with the staff there. It is the 1880s and lowly telegraph clerk Nathaniel Steepleton finds that his house has been broken into and a mysterious pocket watch left in his bedroom.

The ending wrapped up all the details and there was even a reference to Merrick and his house in Cornwall ( The Bedlam Stacks). Mori was deployed sparingly throughout, although his clairvoyant machinations drove the entire plot. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island.