Weaver's Lament (Industrial Magic, #2)

by Emma Newman

[pamela]

Weaver's Lament is a pleasant enough distraction, but it fails to deliver anything of real substance. I'm not enjoying the serialised nature of the series, as each instalment is too short to go into any real depth and ends up feeling a little unsatisfying as soon as I got to the end.

I think my real problem is that everything feels either a little too on-the-nose, or poorly thought out. The characters have no depth, and the world doesn't make sense. I like the Steampunk fantasy aesthetic of the alternate history that Weaver's Lament tries to convey, but the very nature of magic in the world fails to work for me. Magic serves no purpose other than to power machinery. That's not enough for me to believe in the inherent importance of it since there are still mechanics at work that don't require magic. There is no development of how and why magic works, what The Royal Society is, or how Charlotte, the protagonist, is learning to deal with her latent magical abilities. With how short the novellas are, there's simply not enough information provided for me to become involved in the characters or the story.

One of the most significant issues I'm having is that the characters are mostly non-characters. Charlotte is a typical 'Mary Sue' type, her fiance, George, is essentially absent, Magus Hopkins exists just to be handsome and to create a meaningless love triangle, and Charlotte's brother, Ben, has no real personality or depth. The antagonist, Ledbetter, was developed a little more in the first book, but in Weaver's Lament is again, largely absent. Charlotte goes undercover as a mill worker, meets some new characters, feels sorry for them, and moves on after literally two days with no real personal development except to think 'maybe I'm a socialist now?'. There was simply nothing to invest me in the plot, characters, or world of the series.

Weaver's Lament is short, so can be read in a single sitting, so it's a fun distraction. But I just wanted more from it. I said this about the first book as well. The series has potential, but the books need to be longer, self-enclosed and with a lot more character development and world building.