Regency Steampunk that feels cozy even though there are regal and magical politics at play?

Throw in an important theft, males that aren’t afraid of feminism, and a suppressed woman finally getting free of her suffocating future life.

There’s a lot to like here.

I like my cozy reads to have some stakes but I think it got a little lost in the insta-love of the main characters.

I feel like the world building was interrupted by repetitive character internal dialogue. (Though Rel Carrol does a nice job of circling back and full circle moments.)

That being said, this is a smirk worthy pick for SPFBO11, for sure. Just come for the romance, and you’ll have a good time.

Difficult to resist, hmm? Perhaps I would attend the garden party. Then that highway-officer-rogue would learn just how irresistible I could be with a head full of questions and a mystery to solve.

No matter how high the stakes are, there’s always time for a fancy party and a new outfit.

Of Mages and Makers is set in a world where the regency era intersects with the gilded age in an explosion of stylish steampunk, and where conflicts between magic users and inventers, upper and lower class people, politicians and spies, and members of the same family, threaten to tear everything apart. When Arthur Keyes’s sister Cecily invents something that could let ordinary people use magic but her blueprints that prove she’s the inventor are stolen, he has to go on a mad quest to find them, where he is inexorably drawn to Audrey Clune, a young woman with a mysterious background who is embroiled in family politics and an engagement she doesn’t want. The two of them embark on a series of capers to set everything right, and maybe fall in love.

My favourite thing about this book by far is the romance between Audrey and Art. They’re both really fun and they have great chemistry with each other. Their attraction is immediate and feels really real even before they know each other’s names, and it’s satisfying to get to watch them develop past initial lust into real affection for each other through the stressful, high-stakes situation they find themself in. The moments in the book where they’re talking or flirting or where they’re with other people trying to deny that they like each other for the sake of propriety are really delightful and fun to read. I liked those a lot. They’re both really interesting characters who are fun and easy to want to read about.

Art and Audrey’s relationships with their families and friends are also really well done. There’s a lot of good dialogue and interplay between characters in this book, from Art and his insane sister to Audrey and her sketchy grandmother, and they all feel like real kinds of relationships that people have. That’s rarer in fantasy than I’d like and it was really nice to see here. It felt like I was following a week in the life of just some ordinary people who happened to be trying to save the world from evil rich people. Which was also a storyline I supported, because I do like to see real world issues reflected in fantasy, and evil rich people sure is a real world issue that’s very pressing.

There were some other elements that I didn’t find worked as well for me personally. This is very much personal taste (as all reading is), but I’m very picky about steampunk and though I like that those elements were incorporated into the plot, I wish that they’d gone a little farther and cut a little deeper. Some of the stuff about how inventions can be transgressive and can alter the course of a society’s history was really good, and I wish there’d been more of that. It’s undercut a little for me by the fact that the characters involved are all well-to-do wealthy people, and though for them their reputations are everything, for the reader it’s sometimes hard to recognize whether there are much in the way of meaningful stakes for them here. Art’s sister is in danger of being executed, and that hangs over the narrative but those stakes are for me a bit disconnected from a lot of what’s happening in the story. The comments about how Cecily’s invention is going to help poor people are appreciated but we never really see any consequences of that really and I wish we did.

The magic elements of the story are really interesting and are a cool addition to a steampunk world. I really like how all the magic is described and how it appears to work, and as someone who is really not a fan of detailed and complex magic systems, I appreciated that we didn’t get much of that in the book. It felt to me like author Rel Carroll had that complex magic system in mind and knew the rules when writing, but wisely (in my opinion) kept most of it off-page.

Some of the magical elements of the book do come a little out of left field for me and I wish they’d been revealed much earlier. There were a lot of third act reveals that all happen in fairly quick succession and that change what it feels like the book is about, and I wish most or even all of them had been either not a secret, or revealed at least to the audience much earlier in the book. Normally I’m a lover of a reveal, but here I felt that because the consequences of so many of the reveals about both Audrey and Art really end up structuring what the book is actually about, I ended up just wishing I’d known those things earlier, and also being confused why we didn’t find out about them (especially some of Art’s secrets) earlier since the book is told from their first-person perspectives.

I wish Of Mages and Makers had just a little bit less going on so it was easier to concentrate on the cool stuff that is happening in it. Some parts of it were really awesome and some parts of it weren’t really for me in the end, but I’m one person and I think that it’ll have a lot of fans out there. Regency and steampunk are both kickass aesthetics, and mixing them is a great idea, and romance readers who are interested in something a little different are sure to be really into this one!

Overall, I liked Of Mages and Makers. It was an enjoyable light read, perfect for vacation. But it did leave me feeling a bit conflicted and unable for a long time to put my finger on exactly why.

First of all, the things I liked. The prose carried me breezily through the story, and the characters were all easy to like. The magic system was interesting, and I really liked how the world itself was divided up in terms of “makes”: the lower class “cogs” and the upper class “gems” living in a country with city names like “Diadem”. I did wish that we could have gotten a little bit more detail about the social make-up of the world, though; there didn’t seem to be very much difference between cogs and gems if Art and Audrey were representative of the classes. Art seemed to have just as much money as Audrey, if not more, and he moved through the same circles with much the same attitudes.

This leads me to why I finished the book conflicted. I just wanted more. I did read the blurb before I started the book (as I usually do), and I think the Bridgerton comp may have led me to believe that we were going to get a romantasy with at least a little spice in it, along with a specifically Regency setting, which would have been a slightly different twist on the usual steampunk.

Instead, I feel like we got a fairly straightforward Victorian steampunk that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be fantasy with a romantic subplot or a romantasy with a steampunk backdrop. I really wish it had committed to one or the other—either would have been fine with me—because it felt like vital fantasy plot was sometimes dropped into the romance out of the blue, but it also felt like the romance had little actual conflict because most of the conflict resided externally, in the steampunk action plot. So, the story stayed mainly on the surface, or at least it felt that way to me. This contributed to the cute, sweet, light feeling, but I was also frustrated when I got to the end. In a way, the fact that I was frustrated is a testament to everything the author did right: I liked the characters and the world enough that I was frustrated when I didn’t get enough of them. But it still ended with me feeling like there was something missing.

He reached out across the carriage, so I sat forward and took his hand in another firm, businesslike shake. Once again, he did not pull away. Keeping his gaze on my face, he bent forward until his hair fell across his eyes and tickled my wrist. Then he kissed my hand—a very slow, very deliberate kiss.
I couldn’t look away. Couldn’t breathe. Or think.

Of Mages and Makers is a secondary world, steampunk romance full of hijinks and featuring a lively cast of characters.I usually try to stay away from more generalized recommendations (e. g. “fans of fantasy will enjoy this”), but in the case of Rel Carroll’s finalist I would recommend it most to steampunk fans, as well as anyone looking for a light fantasy romp that doesn’t take itself (or its themes) too seriously. It’s been billed as Regency steampunk, though I would caution fans of historical fantasy not to go in expecting a detailed historical feel, or, indeed, a regent. For me, there wasn’t much to distinguish it from more general steampunk settings (though perhaps the intention is simply meant to indicate to the reader that we should be picturing empire waists and bonnets). There’s nothing wrong with this more general approach, but I mention the fact so that it’s easier for the right readers to find the book.

Mages focuses on two romantic leads–Art and Audrey–as they pursue a stolen set of blueprints that could either upend their society’s formal class system, or be modified to create a devastating weapon. Even worse, the blueprints originally belonged to Art’s inventor sister, Cecily. Cecily is at risk of execution for overstepping her own class expectations and for her creations’s capacity to allow those not naturally blessed with magic to be able to produce it. Audrey–a would-be stage actress living in her dead mother’s shadow–is engaged to the chief suspect in the blueprints’ theft, a fact that makes her instant attraction to self-described rake, Art, just a tad problematic. For Art’s part, he’s shocked to find himself employed by the queen and working alongside Harland–an enigmatic mage assigned to help with the recovery.

Carroll crafts a charming story in Mages. It’s light and breezy, hitting some popular romantic storylines and archetypes (a dashing thief, a hyperfocused if frazzled engineer, and a would-be starlet with secrets). I’m always a sucker for a roguish highwayman lead, so there were aspects of that part of the story that especially worked for me, and without giving away specifics, I enjoyed how Carroll plays with gender expectations in that context as the novel progresses into its final act. There’s also plenty of action in Mages–enough that I’m tempted to compare it with a Marvel movie, but set in a fantastical nineteenth-century and with a solid helping of romance to bring more heart.

That said, despite readable prose and likeable characters, Mages stumbles at the structural level. While Art and Audrey are easy to root for, I was rarely compelled by them. A large part of the reason why is that for the majority of the book the stakes aren’t really Audrey or Art’s–they belong to Cecily and to the lower classes. The stakes are also seemingly very high–the possibility of Cecily’s execution is floated in the opening, and if her invention is made accessible, it will completely revolutionize the state (and possibly also lead to a real revolution, I would think). Yet the majority of the cast more or less brush this element aside. This reaction (or lack thereof) just doesn’t feel believable, even in the context of a light romance, and it unfortunately limited my ability to connect with the protagonists, story, or world. There’s some lip service paid to the idea that Art and his family are themselves from a lower class, yet they move quite fluidly in wealthy spaces and seem anything but underprivileged. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this–plenty of compelling stories involve a protagonist who’s clawed their way up the social ladder in face of bigotry or poverty–yet Art never feels genuinely impacted by his background, with the result that he never seems invested in the possibility promised by Cecily’s invention. In fact, with a couple of significant exceptions, the lower class people we do meet are generic thugs, described in unflattering terms. None of this would necessarily be a problem, if it didn’t flatten the stakes as they pertain to Art. Even the possibility of Cecily’s execution is never something we really feel on page, and since Cecily disappears from the narrative very early and for most of the book, it left me wondering throughout why we were specifically following Art and Audrey.

There are a number of late-stage reveals that tease a richness of character and plot that I wish so badly had been seeded earlier so they were more impactful. More than one significant character detail comes seemingly out of nowhere in the final quarter. These are treated as plot points the audience is expected to already know (and we should know, given that we’re in Art and Audrey’s POVs). Several times, I found myself thinking I must have missed a critical detail earlier in the book, only to reread or consult a fellow judge, and find that I hadn’t. It’s genuinely a shame, because the elements that do get introduced later on are potentially powerful and would have deepened the character work as well as Art and Audrey’s individual investments in the world around them.

Though I did have major issues with the structure and focus of Mages, the book does pick up steam (hah!) in its final act. You can tell Carroll’s having fun and it’s easy to have fun with her. One of the plot elements that comes into focus as Mages concludes is the mystery surrounding Art’s companion, Harland. Throughout, I found that Carroll did a wonderful job giving the reader just enough information about him to intrigue, and it was this storyline that kept my attention throughout.

Rel Carroll is a talented writer and Mages has a lot going for it. I think, with some better interweaving of its plot threads and a stronger sense of where its focus lies, it would also have a good chance of making a huge splash.