The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia

The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia

Mattie is a clockwork woman with a windup heart. She is like a porcelain doll made of whalebone, copper gears, and steel. In the center of her chest is a clear box with a hole in it. It is there that her creator, Loharri puts the key in to wind up her heart.

They exist in a city at the edge of an industrial age not our own. The novel is a kind of steampunk, but not in any Victorian style. There is a mix of the magic of alchemy and clockwork machines. Mattie is the bridge between two factions in the city, the mechanics and the alchemists. She is an intelligent automaton trained as an alchemist.

Unlike either faction, she can see the suffering of the common people, the poisoned air and water, the deformed children bred to work in the mines and the peasants forced off their land by automata. She also is in touch with the gargoyles, the fleeting creatures who represent the nobility who are quickly becoming irrelevant in the larger scheme of things.

The city itself is fascinating; there is the foreign quarter with its dark skinned inhabitants, the constant flow of centipede like carriages, the paper factories, the parliament, the palace toppoed with gargoyles, and the automatons doing menial labor. It is a city falling apart at the seems moving into civil war and destruction.

This story is a tragedy and it does not come to a happy ending. There is even an element of a love story between Sebastian, a rogue mechanic, and Mattie. This goes against the wishes of her creator, Loharri. The sense of tragedy and forbidden love is what makes the book so wonderful and lyrical. The story pits the ideas of tradition versus progress against each other leaving ruin in the end. The story is full of unique images and has a poetic quality to it that touches your sense of wonder and imagination.

Ekaterian Sedia also wrote The Secret History of Moscow. This is a story of weird fiction. I could compare it to Jeff Vandermeer's Ambergris novels, or possibly China Mieville. She has a website, http://www.ekaterinasedia.com .

The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia-- Review

The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia is an absolutely unique and wonderful urban fantasy which incorporates Russian fairytales.

Galina a young woman watches her sister turn into a bird and fly away. She is left with her sister's baby and mother to watch. Galina tries to get help and eventually ends up with Yakov a police inspector trying to find a slew of missing people who have also turned into jackdaws, pigeons, and owls then simply disappeared.

Thus begins a strange urban fairytale where eventually Galina ends up in an underground fairyland Moscow underneath the real city. There we readers get to meet many strange Russian small spirits, small gods, and fairies. There is Father Frost, Zhemun the Celestial Cow, and Khoschey the Deathless. These are truly wonderful and strange characters.
The city itself reminds me of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere or China Mieville's Un Lundun. It is a deathless land of the forgotten.

After getting help in the underground city, they must return to the surface travelling through the dark forest under the city of Moscow, crossing the black river and meeting the ferryman, and eventually making it up top. There are helpers with them. I won't list all of them. It would spoil the surprise. A few of them are a white jackdaw with the soul of a thug trapped in it, rats that can form into a bear, and a gypsy girl.

If you like urban fantasy, or fairytales this is an excellent read. There is a sardonic, melancholy, funny quality to the book unlike anything else I have ever read. The setting is truly unique. The writing uses memories and evokes feeling far better than most novels which I have read.

If I gave stars, this would be the North Star.