Who Holds the Key to Your Heart?
Title: The Alchemy of Stone
(Amazon, Goodreads, Website)
Author: Ekaterina Sedia
(Amazon, Goodreads, Website)
Series: None
Publisher: Prime Books
Genre: Sci-Fi, Steampunk
Format: Paperback
Source: Purchased from bookstore
Synopsis:
Mattie, an intelligent automaton skilled in the use of alchemy, finds herself caught in the middle of a conflict between gargoyles, the Mechanics, and the Alchemists. With the old order quickly giving way to the new, Mattie discovers powerful and dangerous secrets — secrets that can completely alter the balance of power in the city of Ayona. However, this doesn’t sit well with Loharri, the Mechanic who created Mattie and still has the key to her heart — literally A steampunk novel of romance, political intrigue, and alchemy, The Alchemy of Stone represents a new and intriguing direction by the author of the critically-acclaimed The Secret History of Moscow.
Review:
I’m not always a fan of books about robots, but this one seemed different. Not to mention the cover (which prompts me to buy books more often than the blurb on the cover) is beautiful and amazing. I’ve seen an alternate cover that I totally wouldn’t have bought the book if that was the cover I’d seen.
Mattie is an automaton, a machine, that Loharri created and made to resemble a woman. She has a porcelain face, a box with her clockwork heart which must be wound by the key kept by Loharri, and resembles a woman in all other aspects. Her hair came from a boy who died, which plays a subtle underlying part in the story. Loharri created Mattie to be able to remember things and to learn, to be intelligent unlike many of the other automatons that are throughout the city. As time goes on Mattie asks to become an apprentice to an Alchemyst and Loharri grants Mattie her emancipation so that she can pursue that goal. The book starts years after Mattie has become an alchemyst herself, and has a little shop of her own away from Loharri’s house, but she must visit him to have her heart wound with the key that he keeps. Mattie’s wish is to have the key herself and free of the restrictions placed upon her by having someone else hold the key.
At first this is a story of Mattie gaining her freedom, but although that underlies the story, it is not the main point. Mattie is swept up in research after she is commissioned by the gargoyles to free them from the stone that they came from and will return to as time goes on. In the beginning there were many gargoyles and they called forth the stone to build the Palace and the Parliament and many other prominent buildings in the city. As time has passed, the gargoyles one by one are turning back into stone and do not come to life. A former alchemyst was trying to find a way to break the cycle and free the gargoyles, but she died before she was able to find the answer. Mattie learns that the woman’s soul is with the Soul Smoker, who everyone avoids as it could steal their soul, but since Mattie does not have a soul to lose, she seeks him out and not only is able to speak to the dead woman through the Soul Smoker, but she also befriends him.
Through her many interactions with the myriad of other characters, you begin to forget that Mattie is a machine. I found more than once that I could not only imagine what she would look like but how she would move and what it would be like to know her in person. I rooted for her at times and felt her pain after her encounter with Sebastian. It was strange and yet, fantastic. The io9.com review put it very well:
While it’s action-packed, The Alchemy of Stone is most properly understood as a character study. Mournful and romantic, Mattie is the mechanical, wind-up doll so many gothy teenage girls imagine themselves to be. And her vulnerability haunts many adult women too: We may not have whalebone corsets embedded in our skin, but we all struggle to be perceived as something more than pretty little tools. It’s that struggle that makes Mattie such a vivid, memorable, and ultimately human character.
The story unfolds and as she works to find the answer to the gargoyles problem, she is swept up in the conflict between the machinists (who essentially rule and continue to make new inventions to do things that people already do) and the rest. It says a lot about our current society in that as we continue to modernize (what the machinists do) we push people from the world. Automatons replaced workers in the fields and farms and the people are sent to work in the mines. Carriages pulled by lizards (remember, fictional world) are replaced by mechanical caterpillars. Yes sometimes the machines help us out, but how many jobs have they replaced as well that could be done by people?
The author uses two perspectives to tell the story and at first I couldn’t figure out who was speaking other than Mattie, but as the story unfolds, the author uses the gargoyles perspective to help fill in the story with things Mattie does not see or experience that would have been hard for the reader to grasp the extent of things without that second viewpoint. I didn’t find it distracting at all, but did at times want to hear more from the gargoyles.
I won’t give away the ending, but I urge everyone to read this book. It is profound, beautiful, and one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time.
It is a book that will be added to my collection, and those that know me well will know this is a special honor as I don’t keep books unless they are truly outstanding.