Our Lady of the Ice

Starred review from June 29, 2015
Clarke (the Assassin’s Curse series) brings novelty and delight to steampunk Antarctica in this complex and lovely mystery. Eliana Gomez is the first female PI in Hope City, a domed city originally built to support an amusement park full of steam-powered automatons, and she wants nothing more than to emigrate to warmer climes. When recently widowed Lady Luna, an heiress with a secret, asks Eliana to recover some stolen documents, the fee is too good to turn down, even though it puts Eliana in the path of Hope City’s biggest crime boss and at odds with her boyfriend. With robots from the amusement park evolving their own intelligence and agendas, freedom fighters agitating more openly for Antarctic independence, and the increasing unreliability of the power supplying heat and light to the city’s main dome, Eliana’s need for a hasty departure quickly becomes urgent, even as the tasks required become riskier. The worldbuilding will sweep readers away, and the entertaining and compelling cast of characters will make excellent company on the journey.

August 15, 2015
A sci-fi mystery involving robots and revolutionaries. Lady Marianella Luna is a rich, beautiful woman with a problem, one she can't bring to the cops. Instead, she takes her dilemma to a private eye, Eliana Gomez. Eliana eagerly accepts Lady Luna's case-and her money-and begins chasing clues into the city's underbelly. From this familiar opening, Clarke invites readers into an uncommon place: Hope City, an improbable metropolis built on the Antarctic ice and kept alive by a protective glass dome. In this alternate Earth, Hope City began as a Victorian-era amusement park, staffed by humans who immigrated to Antarctica as well as androids built for the park. The park closed in the 1940s and deactivated most of its androids, but the city endured. Now many citizens want to move back to the mainland, including Eliana: solving Lady Luna's case will give her the funds to leave. Luna's mystery quickly deepens, introducing Eliana to the city's different elements (including gangsters and an Antarctic separatist movement) and to Sofia, an android that's surreptitiously broken free from human control. The novel's worldbuilding is phenomenal: Hope City's past and present unfold effortlessly. At the same time, its female characters are particularly well-rendered: Eliana and Lady Luna forge a tentative friendship that feels real, while Sofia's story is a refreshing take on whether an android should love or hate the humans around her. Unfortunately, what should have been a thrilling tale of detective work and sentient robots is dragged down by an unbearably lethargic narrative. Although each subplot is ingenious, the story lumbers from one story arc to another-conversations are drawn out for pages on end, characters examine their every passing thought-perhaps leading readers to feel they, too, are trapped in ice. An ambitious novel set in a richly imagined world but impeded by its glacial pace.

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