Full disclosure: I’m friends with Beth. She was one of my first interviews after I started blogging about sci-fi and fantasy last year and I’ve followed her from nervous debut author armed with cookies at her first release party through earning a Locus nomination for that debut, The Clockwork Dagger.

So yeah, I’m a little biased. Take that as you will.

But that doesn’t change that Wings of Sorrow and Bone is a nice dessert after the adventures of Octavia Leander wrapped up in The Clockwork Crown this summer.

Set in the same world as her Clockwork novels, Sorrow and Bone follows a pair of side characters from Crown as they work to help the captive gremlins of politician and scientist Balthazar Cody. The pair — the talented mechanic Rivka Stout, and Tatiana Garret, an ambitious girl living in the shadow of her brother Alonzo, discover Cody is experimenting on gremlins to create a giant mecha-gremlin chimera to fight in his blood-sports.

Joined by apprentice medician Broderick, they hatch a plan to disrupt his experiments and teach the people of Tamarania that the mischievous and destructive creatures are not to be feared. Teaming up with Rivka’s grandmother, publisher and princess-in-hiding Viola Stout, they publish a book about gremlins and the cruelty they experience.

Its animal-rights activism meets viral marketing in one clever novella. And it shows that while Octavia and Alonzo’s story from the Clockwork duology may be finished, there are still plenty of tales to be told in the steampunk world of Caskentia and Tamarania. ~~ Michael Senft

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