REVIEW: Clockwork Boys by T. Kingfisher
First published in 2017, the novella Clockwork Boys by Hugo and Nebula award-winning writer T. Kingfisher has recently been given a rerelease by the team at Titan Books. The second novel in the Clocktaur War series, Wonder Engine, will get the same treatment in the Spring of 2026. I am a massive T. Kingfisher fan and adore her cute and creepy novellas, so I was very excited to get my hands on Clockwork Boys.
In Clockwork Boys, we follow a paladin, an assassin, a forger, and a scholar on a quest. It is a tried and tested format of epic stories, but rather than being on this mission for the good of their hearts, this band of misfits is there because they have no other choice. Charged with treason and sporting magical tattoos that will literally eat them alive if they do not try their best to succeed forger Slate, assassin Brenner, disgraced knight Caliban, and the very reluctant Edmund, the scholar must travel across the border, deep into enemy territory, to discover how the deadly clockwork boys are made and how they can be killed. If they succeed, they will all receive pardons; it’s a shame that no one expects them to.
Clockwork Boys is a darkly comic story, and the slightly broken group of eccentric characters was endearing. But as much as I really really wanted to have a great time reading this novella, it missed the mark for me. Which I am genuinely very sad about, as T. Kingfisher is one of my favourite authors. I think the darkest of gallows humour and light horror, which I loved in novellas like Nettle and Bone or A House with Good Bones, wasn’t quite as big a part of this story, and Clockwork Boys is more of a traditional adventure or heist fantasy.
However, Clockwork Boys was still an okay read. It didn’t blow my proverbial socks off, but I didn’t abandon it in frustration. I enjoyed the characters, particularly Slate, and Kingfisher remains very good at creating normal, adult women in her writing who feel very real. There was humour, and a fair amount of witty banter, and the story flowed well for a short novel. Clockwork Boys covers a journey to a place and sets up the reader for the second novel, and it does its job.
I went into Clockwork Boys expecting the wrong thing; I am used to Kingfisher creating superb dark novellas and wrongly presumed that this story would be more of the same. This is not a light and airy swashbuckling tale; it has some dark elements, like the demon rotting inside Caliban, and it subverts many of the quest narratives’ tropes, but it wasn’t the sort of story I was expecting to read. Kingfisher discusses her motivations for writing Clockwork Boys in the afterward at the end of the novella and explains her inspirations of games like the Neverwinter Nights or Dragon Age, if reader are more familiar with these games and the stories of fantasy paladins they will likely enjoy Clockwork Boys more than I did.
Thank you to T. Kingfisher and the team at Titan Books for sending us a copy of Clockwork Boys.
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