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I have the good fortune to share a house with someone who works for a book distributor. She gets all sorts of advance readers' copies (ARCs) of the books that she's distributing, usually long before they appear in the store. Unfortunately, she doesn't distribute HarperCollins, which publishes most of my favourite books, but I do get to read the Artemis Fowl and Bartimaeus books in advance. Every so often there'll be a brand new one that catches my attention, and the most recent of these was Fly By Night, by Frances Hardinge.
    It's certainly something. The world it creates is intricately detailed and well-organized, and once you learn how things work (it doesn't take very long) it feels like it could be completely real. It's been described as a 'fictionalized 18th-century England' but the only things that tie it to that reality are the costumes, the idea of coffee houses, and the authorities' fondness for capital punishment. If you take 18th-century England, make it polytheistic, add a long-running multi-candidate debate on royal succession, and throw in some very powerful guilds, then you might get close to the world in this book.
    The star is Mosca Mye, a 12-year-old orphan who, thanks to her late father's tutelage, loves to collect words. Aside from this idiosyncracy, she's pretty much like every plucky and resourceful orphan in literature, except that the story she's a part of does not follow the same narrative rules as Plucky Orphan stories usually do. ( More... )