The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia

As she searches for the method to do so (the titular alchemy of stone), she meets Sebastian, a man from the East whose mother was a potent stone alchemist. While she may be legally free, Loharri still controls the literal key to her heart-the special key required to wind up her artificial heart.Īt the beginning of the story, Mattie receives a message from the remaining gargoyles, pleading with her to use her skills to devise a way for them to become mortal and escape their metamorphosis into stone. When she expresses a desire to train as an Alchemist, her master, Loharri, a prominent city Mechanic, sets her free. I don’t often say it, but I can’t think of anyone who could really enjoy this book.The protagonist, Mattie, is an automaton - one of the city's few sentient ones. I couldn’t even enjoy the steampunk elements because I was having too much trouble suspending my disbelief about everything else. It’s just absurdity piled onto absurdity at this point. Not only that, but in any reasonable book, Sasha would run a fair risk of getting killed because Sedia decided to complicate matters by sending her heroine right into the middle of the Taiping Rebellion. It’s fun to watch her disguise herself as a hussar and travel across Russia by train and airship, but there was always the question in my mind about who would listen to her if she actually made it to her destination. It never occurs to her that as the daughter of a minor noble who has only just made her social debut she has zero political clout. Sasha never questions why her mission might fail. For some reason, Sasha thinks that if she can arrange an alliance between China and Russia, her friends will be released from prison. What I couldn’t go along with was Sasha’s self-appointed diplomatic mission to China with her English friend, Jack, in tow. So far, so good–except that the plot makes a left turn at this point and starts heading into WTF territory. She makes friends with Chinese students and a mysterious English student. Sasha is a lighthearted girl for the first few chapters, but when she gets the opportunity to go to university she seizes it with both hands.

Engineering and science are on the rise, leading to an early technological revolution as well.

Our heroine, Sasha Trubetskaya, lives in an alternate Russia where the Decembrist Revolution succeeded and the serfs were freed.

But Heart of Iron actually got worse the further into it I got. But I finished Ekaterina Sedia’s Heart of Iron anyway, most likely because her other book, The Secret History of Moscow, was so good. The plot was so preposterous that I should have stopped reading it and went and found something better. I can’t believe I actually finished this book.

The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia