Escapement
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4.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In his novel Mainspring, Lake created an enormous canvas for storytelling with his hundred mile high Equatorial Wall that holds up the great Gears of the Earth. Now in Escapement, he explores more of that territory.
Paolina Barthes is a young woman of remarkable intellectual ability – a genius on the level of Isaac Newton. But she has grown up in isolation, in a small village of shipwreck survivors, on the Wall in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. She knows little of the world, but she knows that England rules it, and must be the home of people who possess the learning that she so desperately wants. And so she sets off to make her way off the Wall, not knowing that she will bring her astounding, unschooled talent for sorcery to the attention of those deadly factions who would use or kill her for it.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This lively and thought-provoking sequel to 2007's Mainspring expands Lake's alternate 19th-century world of baroque politics and gothic clockwork. Paolina Barthes is a teenage scientific prodigy born in a small Portuguese fishing village at the base of the massive equatorial gear-wall. Determined to learn from English engineering "wizards" and understand the work of the great gears and wheels that move the universe, Paolina creates a homebrew chronometer, or "gleam," and sets off toward London. When she discovers the gleam has astonishing magical properties that only she can evoke, she becomes a target of various political and philosophical factions. Her efforts to figure out what the gleam can do while evading capture and persevering on her quest recall Lyra and the alethiometer from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, but Paolina's sharp engineer's mind puts a very different spin on her journey. Lake effectively anneals steampunk with geo-mechanical magic in an allegorical matrix of empire building and Victorian natural science.
