2/6/2013- The Lady Astronomer by Katy O'Dowd

Hello! It's been a while since I've posted here- exactly three finished books- so I feel like I need to do at least one catch up post! Two of the three books I read were Spice and Wolf volumes 5 and 6, a pair of Japanese novels translated into English and set right in the middle of a series, so, for fear of slipping and typing up paragraphs and paragraphs of spoilers, those, for now, are not getting their own posts. They were both very entertaining, though, and I can't wait to read the seventh volume!

For today, my post is about The Lady Astronomer by Katy O'Dowd, which is another book I downloaded on a whim when it was free on Amazon.com. (Currently, it costs $2.99, which also isn't too steep.) It had pretty good reader reviews on the site, but, as it is with most of the books I download when they're free, I really didn't know what to expect from it. I did know it was a steampunk novel, since that was written all over the reviews, and no one was complaining about the spelling or grammar, so that was enough for me.

What I got from The Lady Astronomer was a book that I'd have no problems recommending to a junior high girl that wasn't put off by magic or robots in her reading. It's cute and cheerful, with really cool mechanical stuff littering every chapter and characters that are quite likable. I did think that, at the start, things seemed a little disjointed, with chapters leaving off and picking up at places that seemed slightly random, and the romantic elements that kick in about halfway through seemed forced, like more of an unnecessary subplot than anything else. Once Lucretia, the leading lady, has to go on a trip on her own, I felt like her leaving the supporting cast behind really got the story to pick up, giving it more focus and suspense than the first half of the book had. Still, as a whole, I thought that reading The Lady Astronomer was enjoyable, even if I wasn't exactly the target audience. It reminded me of something that I would have gotten as a surprise from a book order flier when I was in school, and I can easily imagine it being in one of those now.