(cleaning out my kindle) dnf @ 11% remembered why i didn't finish this one the first time around: too wordy, too much exposition.

Insgesamt durchaus nett, aber nicht viel mehr.
Die Geschichte ist spannend und einfallsreich, aber auch recht flach. Erinnert ziemlich an schlechtere Comics aus den USA: Großer, äußerst männlicher Held, der allen anderen überlegen ist, kämpft gegen das Böse.
Immerhin: Wer hier eigentlich wirklich böse ist, ändert sich zuweilen, eine klare, unveränderliche Rollenverteilung gibt es also nicht.
Trotzdem hat mich das Buch wenig beeindruckt. Vergnüglich, aber nicht gut genug, dass ich Lust hätte, weitere Bücher der Reihe zu lesen. ( )

An enjoyable, action-packed steampunk adventure story.

First, the criticism. This story won me over with colour, pace and sheer enthusiasm. The prose was clunky in places: infodumping occurred a few times, and some sentences were simply convoluted. It wasn't a major problem, but it could have been smoother. I didn't spot any typos, but punctuation could have done with an overhaul too..

The characters were nice sketches, but felt quite one-dimensional. Our protagonist is a Gentleman Adventurer without much sense of a distinctive personality. His relationship to the other characters was perfunctory. There was a pleasing main antagonist, but the rest of the cast felt equally skeletal. It seems written to be an iconic rather than a dramatic story, which I'm fine with, so character development isn't compulsory. That being said, a bit more depth wouldn't have gone amiss.

At times it felt like we were dropped into volume two of a story. There's clearly backstory here, but I felt that there might be a little too much hinting at past exploits. It kept giving me the impression that there might actually be a previous story which would cast light on the events of this one - but apparently not.

Lots of action keeps the pace up, and Green isn't afraid to have carnage on the streets. At first I was a bit put off by it, but this is clearly a story aiming to avoid the mysteriously low death tolls of antagonists in many adventure stories. And it's a grim Victorian setting already, so why not slaughter a few hundred? On that note, I liked Green's frankness about just how bad things are for the common folk, and most of Abroad, in this setting of exciting technology and Victorian mindsets. The protagonist is not entirely likeable, despite being the heroic type - as part of the Establishment, he just can't be. Still, we can get behind his attempts to avoid mass carnage.

The plotting behind it was nice, and I appreciate Green not trying to hide it from the reader. There's a few bits to put together yourself along the way, but mostly we know considerably more than the protagonist, like just how much trouble he's in.

Overall I enjoyed the story, and I thought the world was a satisfying take on the steampunk theme. The prose is a little rough around the edges, but action and style are clearly the focus here, and Green delivers that well enough. I'll consider getting the next book, and hope that we might see some more depth to the characters as the story continues. ( )

Read this a while ago now, so memory's a little fuzzy, but I'm quite sure I didn't like the protagonist and treatment of female characters. ( )

It reads something like a late 19th/early 20th century story, and technically it is victorian. Victoria has been 160 years on the throne. A breakin in the Natural HIstory Museum with a murdered watchman and Ulysses Quicksilver is drawn into the investigation. He has to find out what's going on and try to protect the British Empire.

It's fun, you almost know what's going on but not quite, still I do want to read more in this series at some stage. ( )