The Watchmaker's Daughter

“I'd wanted to be a little reckless and experience something I'd never done before, but staying in with a good book now seemed more appealing.”

India Steele is the daughter of a watchmaker who has passed away, and whose store was left to India's ex-, and not to India herself. Women can't own property, you know. On her initial quest to see a wrong righted she meets Matthew Glass, mysterious man from America who's trying to find a specific man who created a specific pocketwatch who once resided in London. India is hired to help him look, having no job and no boarding and needing a roof over her head. So begins a bit of a meandering quest to find this watchmaker, where India meets Matthew's friends and family, visits watchmaker after watchmaker, all the while suspecting Matthew of being more than he seems.

I don't normally read YA and I don't normally read romance, but I was willing to overlook these personal hangups because it was the book being read in my book club on Discord this month and because it was a relatively easy read. The chapters are a bit on the long side, but it still was a very quick read by my standards. I didn't particularly care for how India was written, being that she's supposedly 27 or 28, but waxes wildly between being incredibly capable and incredibly helpless. That bit of inconsistent character development sort of grated on me after a bit. I also felt like the book spins its wheels a bit in the beginning, before we get an infodump about what all this is supposed to mean near the end. I know this is part of a longer series, but I feel like things could have been paced just a bit better. Finally, my old nemesis “we are both attractive and in close proximity to each other, we must fall in love” romance trope reared its ugly head again. I guess I just wish for a bit more...meaning, intent, something, to two people who are suddenly just together after less than a week.

All that said... the idea of clock magic was appealing, it's a unique take on magic I haven't read before. I liked the cast of characters surrounding Matthew, and thought the story itself was well written beyond my pacing hangups. It's an intriguing beginning to a lengthy series, but I'm not sure I'll be continuing with it.