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The Gnome's Engine aka Hobgoblin Nights - Teresa Edgerton
Edgerton apparently changed the title to better match Goblin Moon when she reissued the book, but my old paperback still has the old title. See my review of the first half of the duology here.
So, having finished this, can I just say: hmmm. I liked the first book better, and I can definitely see why I didn't remember much of the plot of this one (beyond one reveal I'll mention under the cut), because it's kind of an incoherent muddle. The first book was meandering but in a fairly intentional sort of way; it went with the general comedy-of-manners style. The second book feels like it tacks together a bunch of plot elements that don't really go together, drop some of the dangling threads from the first book, doesn't really deal with all of its own dangling threads either, and just wasn't nearly as satisfying a read all around.
That being said, I still enjoyed a lot of it! I vaguely remember liking this one better than the previous one when I read them as a tween, and while I'm definitely the other way around now, the parts I enjoyed, I really enjoyed. In particular, is worth the price of admission alone, at least for my particular tastes.
So the second book moves most of the action to their version of colonial North America, with Sera and Elsie and Elsie's working-class love interest (posing as Sera's brother) now on the run under assumed names, taking a series of jobs as they work their way along the coast and ...
... well, get sidetracked into a quest to build a high-tech steampunk machine to try to raise Atlantis, as you do, I guess.
Also, Sera gets her own sidequest trying to figure out what's going on with the hobgoblins in the latest of the series of small towns they've been living in. Hobgoblins, in this world, are a pest species, something like monkeys or raccoons, that steal things and bite people and live underground. But the local hobgoblins are acting weird, and Sera rescues a hobgoblin baby and then - this is the reveal I remembered from reading it before - ends up in a labyrinth underground and eventually emerges into a hobgoblin marketplace and finds out that they're sentient after all.
When I was a kid, I thought it was a neat reveal and I loved the description of the market with its cobbled-together stalls and makeshift goods. As an adult, though, I can't fail to notice how that plot thread just ends there. Hobgoblins are still viewed as subsentient pests, trapped and poisoned and shot by the townspeople, so that's going to go how well, exactly? Luckily, perhaps, we don't find out or ever hear about them again.
In fact, the entire last third or so of the book feels incredibly rushed. There's a bunch of stuff from the last book to wrap up, including Elsie's obsessed troll bridgegroom Skogrsa who has switched his allegiance to Sera, the various romances, and the raising-Atlantis plot. There's a kind of a speed-run of a climax in which they actually DO raise Atlantis, get to explore it for a day or so until it sinks again, and discover an immortality-granting philosopher's stone which they promptly lose again. I think I liked this as a kid too. Now it seems rushed and unsatisfying. I feel like this book really should have either been two books or had a little less plot happening.
I did like the things I liked! Sera and Skelbrooke's romance is a lot of fun. The worldbuilding is neat and interesting, and the general time period and setting (an idealized fantasy expy of late 1600s/early 1700s colonial New England) is one that I don't see written about very much. The book has a number of vivid and engaging individual set-pieces (the hobgoblin market, Sera and Elsie's brief tenure in an obviously haunted girl's school, Sera and Skelbrooke imprisoned by trolls, the Atlantis-raising) that are a lot of fun as individual scenes but also don't feel like they go together into a coherent whole, but they're very engaging while they're happening, if that makes any sense? It's just looking back on it later that they almost feel like disconnected scenes from several different books rather than one narrative.
Some of it hasn't aged well. There's the extremely obvious omission of not!New England's previous inhabitants which the author apparently just decided not to deal with at all, and given the otherwise light fairy-taleish tone I can see why, but then that leaves us with the animalistic hobgoblins as the apparent sole inhabitants of Fantasy North America, which is ... not great. And also, Atlantis is definitely a real thing in this world, the high-tech Atlanteans went somewhere, and the protagonists find some Atlantean architecture near the town they're staying in, so all in all the most consistent thing would be for North America to be a higher-tech sort of place than not!Europe, instead of the empty wilderness that it appears to be.
Also, though on the whole I liked the Sera/Skelbrooke romance a great deal, I was really not wild about Skelbrooke reforming and giving up his vigilante ways now that he's married to Sera, not specifically for her but because it was a phase that he's now grown past. Come on, the Scarlet Pimpernel riff was one of the best things in the first book; I wanted them vigilante-ing together, not moving back to his ancestral mansion to do upper-class things!
So anyway, I liked the first book better, although this one was enjoyable too, and the characters get some nice happy-ending closure to their personal arcs. I wonder if it was intended to either set up further books in this world, or actually was supposed to be two books and got compressed into one (I could see some of my issues with this book having to do with the series being a planned trilogy that was condensed if the first book didn't sell well). In any case, it doesn't look like she wrote any more in this world beyond a few short stories which are apparently bundled into the reissued Hobgoblin Nights ebook.
So, having finished this, can I just say: hmmm. I liked the first book better, and I can definitely see why I didn't remember much of the plot of this one (beyond one reveal I'll mention under the cut), because it's kind of an incoherent muddle. The first book was meandering but in a fairly intentional sort of way; it went with the general comedy-of-manners style. The second book feels like it tacks together a bunch of plot elements that don't really go together, drop some of the dangling threads from the first book, doesn't really deal with all of its own dangling threads either, and just wasn't nearly as satisfying a read all around.
That being said, I still enjoyed a lot of it! I vaguely remember liking this one better than the previous one when I read them as a tween, and while I'm definitely the other way around now, the parts I enjoyed, I really enjoyed. In particular,
Spoiler
Sera being imprisoned with her injured love interest, who has been shot and is presently going through drug withdrawals, and the two of them having to work together to escape and save her from a forced marriage to a cannibalistic trollSo the second book moves most of the action to their version of colonial North America, with Sera and Elsie and Elsie's working-class love interest (posing as Sera's brother) now on the run under assumed names, taking a series of jobs as they work their way along the coast and ...
... well, get sidetracked into a quest to build a high-tech steampunk machine to try to raise Atlantis, as you do, I guess.
Also, Sera gets her own sidequest trying to figure out what's going on with the hobgoblins in the latest of the series of small towns they've been living in. Hobgoblins, in this world, are a pest species, something like monkeys or raccoons, that steal things and bite people and live underground. But the local hobgoblins are acting weird, and Sera rescues a hobgoblin baby and then - this is the reveal I remembered from reading it before - ends up in a labyrinth underground and eventually emerges into a hobgoblin marketplace and finds out that they're sentient after all.
When I was a kid, I thought it was a neat reveal and I loved the description of the market with its cobbled-together stalls and makeshift goods. As an adult, though, I can't fail to notice how that plot thread just ends there. Hobgoblins are still viewed as subsentient pests, trapped and poisoned and shot by the townspeople, so that's going to go how well, exactly? Luckily, perhaps, we don't find out or ever hear about them again.
In fact, the entire last third or so of the book feels incredibly rushed. There's a bunch of stuff from the last book to wrap up, including Elsie's obsessed troll bridgegroom Skogrsa who has switched his allegiance to Sera, the various romances, and the raising-Atlantis plot. There's a kind of a speed-run of a climax in which they actually DO raise Atlantis, get to explore it for a day or so until it sinks again, and discover an immortality-granting philosopher's stone which they promptly lose again. I think I liked this as a kid too. Now it seems rushed and unsatisfying. I feel like this book really should have either been two books or had a little less plot happening.
I did like the things I liked! Sera and Skelbrooke's romance is a lot of fun. The worldbuilding is neat and interesting, and the general time period and setting (an idealized fantasy expy of late 1600s/early 1700s colonial New England) is one that I don't see written about very much. The book has a number of vivid and engaging individual set-pieces (the hobgoblin market, Sera and Elsie's brief tenure in an obviously haunted girl's school, Sera and Skelbrooke imprisoned by trolls, the Atlantis-raising) that are a lot of fun as individual scenes but also don't feel like they go together into a coherent whole, but they're very engaging while they're happening, if that makes any sense? It's just looking back on it later that they almost feel like disconnected scenes from several different books rather than one narrative.
Some of it hasn't aged well. There's the extremely obvious omission of not!New England's previous inhabitants which the author apparently just decided not to deal with at all, and given the otherwise light fairy-taleish tone I can see why, but then that leaves us with the animalistic hobgoblins as the apparent sole inhabitants of Fantasy North America, which is ... not great. And also, Atlantis is definitely a real thing in this world, the high-tech Atlanteans went somewhere, and the protagonists find some Atlantean architecture near the town they're staying in, so all in all the most consistent thing would be for North America to be a higher-tech sort of place than not!Europe, instead of the empty wilderness that it appears to be.
Also, though on the whole I liked the Sera/Skelbrooke romance a great deal, I was really not wild about Skelbrooke reforming and giving up his vigilante ways now that he's married to Sera, not specifically for her but because it was a phase that he's now grown past. Come on, the Scarlet Pimpernel riff was one of the best things in the first book; I wanted them vigilante-ing together, not moving back to his ancestral mansion to do upper-class things!
So anyway, I liked the first book better, although this one was enjoyable too, and the characters get some nice happy-ending closure to their personal arcs. I wonder if it was intended to either set up further books in this world, or actually was supposed to be two books and got compressed into one (I could see some of my issues with this book having to do with the series being a planned trilogy that was condensed if the first book didn't sell well). In any case, it doesn't look like she wrote any more in this world beyond a few short stories which are apparently bundled into the reissued Hobgoblin Nights ebook.