A sort of clever steampunk take on Inspector Gadget (except the good Inspector is also clever and capable; perhaps more like the Doctor). Maybe a little twee. But tremendously good fun. ( )

I'm not sure there are words for how much I love this book, and indeed the whole series.
- Webb's style of writing is something great, few books have such a strong sense of setting that you can almost feel it in places, but this does.
- The characters, in part, are the usual fare, but they're built on well, becoming something a bit more- Lyle is possibly my favourite character from anything- and the dialogue is just great.
- It took me a couple of times reading through for me to fully appreciate it- the narrative can be quite thick in places; I still find myself having to read certain paragraphs a couple of times, but stick with it, read it again, because it just gets better. ( )

It started off as an exciting book with a very unusual protagonist Horatio, but half way through you kind of feel lost and the end is kind of incomplete ( )

Being a modern young adult fantasy novel about a Victorian scientist (my favorite thing!), this book should have been great. It wasn't. The plot was a muddle-- I never figured out what the "villains" were actually going to do if they succeeded-- and the main characters were all poorly motivated and one-dimensional, ranging from a stereotypically absent-minded scientist, to a gutsy girl thief, to a prim and proper young lord. The characters' attitudes feel obnoxious on occasion, and they often fail to notice the most obvious things; there's a sequence where Horatio Lyle is told by a women that she was hypnotized to attack him, and then he's surprised when she attacks him! I wasn't interested in the storyline or the characters, meaning that by the end it was dull-dull-dull.

Stylistically, it was also aggravating. The book switches into the present tense for random scenes, but what is worse is Webb's tendency to write long passages with nothing but lines of dialogue: no actions, no descriptors, no nothing. This is only exacerbated by one of my least favorite "mysterious" techniques, scenes of dialogue where none of the speakers are identified. I find them boring and obnoxious attempts to generate suspense where none exists.

And then there's a scene where one of the characters inspires Thomas Hardy to write Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Despite being nothing like Tess. I groaned. Loudly.

A good friend recommended this book to me as a hybrid between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who, a combination I couldn't resist. I found her description apt and enjoyed this as a quick, fun read. The author describes various routes and places in Victorian London I wasn't very familiar with, so I think the addition of illustrations would have been beneficial. Overall, however, I thought the book was lots of fun and the ending left me anxious to continue reading about their adventures. ( )