Made Things
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4.4 • 21 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky's Made Things is dark fantasy tale of how the most unlikely characters may become the most heroic.
Making friends has never been so important.
Welcome to Fountains Parish--a cesspit of trade and crime, where ambition curls up to die and desperation grows on its cobbled streets like mold on week-old bread.
Coppelia is a street thief, a trickster, a low-level con artist. But she has something other thieves don't... tiny puppet-like companions: some made of wood, some of metal. They don't entirely trust her, and she doesn't entirely understand them, but their partnership mostly works.
After a surprising discovery shakes their world to the core, Coppelia and her friends must re-examine everything they thought they knew about their world, while attempting to save their city from a seemingly impossible new threat.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thieves, mages, and miniature golems run afoul of each other in this charming novella set in a steampunk fantasy world. Coppelia is an orphaned puppet-maker trying to eke a living through pickpocketing and other petty crimes in a grimy, overpopulated city where the ruling mage-lords grind the common folk beneath their heels. Aiding her are two peculiar companions: tiny wood-and-metal homunculi known as Tef and Arc, part of a homunculus delegation sent from their homeland to grow their number and create more of their kind. When Coppelia and her mentor, Auntie Countless, investigate a possible golem on behalf of one of the local robber barons, Coppelia winds up in the clutches of a dangerous evil beneath the city, and it's up to the homunculi to save her. The result is a series of capers that involve unlikely alliances, a good dose of steampunk body horror, and some pointed commentary on what makes people human. Tchaikovsky (Walking to Aldebaran) makes expert use of the novella form to tell a self-contained story, and the dashingly roguish cast, clever prose ("Now the tethered battered and buzzed about... like a maddened candelabra"), and well-placed moments of heartfelt emotion are sure to delight.
