Darth Pedant

This is what happens when a decent author with a good story gets screwed over by her craptastic publisher.

The Girl and the Clockwork Cat is a good story with likable characters. My main problem with the story is that the world building is so lacking. It's Victorian(ish) London with steam coaches and such, but the reader isn't given much more than that. In all matters not pertaining to lock-picking and purse-snatching, our MC Maeko knows less than Jon Snow. Characters occasionally try to school her on matters pertinent to the plot, but it's not enough to form a complete picture, so the reader is left to piece together what they can. Consequently, I'm a little confused as to how the Literati can be the police force and also some type of political party, and it seems pirates are some type of political party too, when they're not dressing like harlots (in Maeko's opinion) and playing exotic music in pubs. Or maybe that's how they do their campaigning? No idea. I'm not even sure if this version of England has a monarch. Sketchy world building aside, it's paced well with drama and suspense, and on storytelling merits alone I would give it at least three stars (even though I thought the love triangle was totally unnecessary), but it's plagued by the typical sloppy editing I've come to expect from Entangled.

Entangled is, in my opinion, little better than a story sweatshop. They crank out hundreds of books a year and quality suffers for quantity as books are rushed through production. Some of their books happily receive quality editing. The rest? Well, this book is a prime example. Missing words, extra words, wrong words, non-words, punctuation errors, tense issues, continuity errors, redundancies, and just about every single problem copy editing and proofreading are supposed to catch weren't caught. The cat's artificial appendage keeps switching legs. Past simple is used when past perfect is called for. Redundancies like "lowering down" were left in. The errors are plentiful and distracting, but I'd still like to read the next installment and see where these characters go from here. I just pray it gets better editing.