I’m glad to be back after a four-month hiatus from the blog! Writing my next novel is what’s kept me away, but I promise there’ll be several more posts before the year’s end. I’m kicking off my return with a review of a wonderful novel I just finished: Storm Glass by Jeff Wheeler.
Review
Imagine a world that is part Oliver Twist and part Downton Abbey, with a heaping of magic and a slight Steampunk vibe, and you’ll begin to get a feel for the world of Storm Glass. It’s one of those novels where the setting is as important as its characters, and the story world, founded on a form of magic called the “mysteries,” has already drawn me to the second book in the series.
Like Regency-era England, society in Storm Glass is deeply divided by class. The wealthy nobles live in sky manors that float above the dangerous and dingy cities where the poor live hard, miserable lives in the shadows of the nobles’ estates. It’s a world where a wealthy family who falls on hard times can have its manor plummet from the sky and crash down upon the tenements of the poor whose lives mean little to the ruling class. And a place where indebted parents can deed away their children to pay off debts, forcing them into lives of involuntary servitude.
The story’s two main characters are drawn from these two different classes. The first is Cettie of the Fells, a twelve-year-old waif of a girl who has been deeded to a horrible woman who keeps a home full of indentured children, Little Orphan Annie style. Even worse, ghosts haunt the Fells, and Cettie has the power to see and hear them as they torment her and the other children each night.
Cettie’s fortunes change, however, when a nobleman named Brant Fitzroy rescues her from her situation and takes her to Fog Willows, the sky mansion he shares with his ailing wife and three children. But most of the wealthy in Storm Glass loathe the fact that a girl from the Fells is living among them in the clouds, and their disdainful attitude toward the poor creates much of the novel’s tension. But so do the ghosts, who seem to follow Cettie wherever she goes.
Meanwhile, Sera Fitzempress, also twelve, is the sheltered heir to the empire’s throne. She wants nothing more than to meet Cettie of the Fells, whose story has become a scandal among the wealthy. Both Sera and Cettie’s stories run parallel in the novel, and while they overlap at times, it is clear the author is setting up a broader narrative for the two in the second book of the series.
The “mysteries”—the magic that runs the nobles’ world and keeps their sky manors afloat—provides one of the novel’s biggest puzzles, and I found myself yearning to know how they work as much as Cettie does. But Wheeler does an excellent job of keeping this a mystery, for lack of a better word, though the story suggests it may have something to do with the ghosts and other supernatural creatures the wealthy keep trapped in their carefully protected world. This is the aspect of the story that intrigued me the most, and I get the sense that Storm Glass is setting the stage for an even more powerful tale in the series to come.