Brilliant!
Fly By Night is masquerading as YA fiction but this piece of fantasy X steampunk is a wonderful book. The heroine, bad-tempered, intelligent Mosca Mye, born on the calendar day sacred to Goodman Palpitattle He Who Keeps Flies Out, joins forces with the thieving, deceiving wordsmith, Eponymous Clent, with a view to making their fortune.
A fortune is a hard thing to make in a land riven by war and persecution. Mosca and Eponymous Clent’s plans to wheedle money out of powerful persons through writing ballads, delivering messages, spying and retrieving goods are hijacked by even more powerful folk and soon they are relying on their wits to save their lives. They do have the assistance of Saracen, Mosca’s beloved pet goose; Eponymous is less enthusiastic about this companion as he is a fearsome beast when aroused to fury.
The setting of the novel is loosely based on England at the start of the Eighteenth Century but mightily warped and exaggerated. It is a place where wet is wetter, the rule of the powerful Guilds more guilty and gritty, poverty is smelly, hungry and desperate, education is a rarity, Dukes and Duchess are mad with power, religion veers between totemic and fanatic, and goodness survives in the cracks. But this novel is also funny. The transformation of the vain highwayman into the radical saviour of the city of Mandelion is very amusing. Mosca’s versatile, vivid and sometimes vulgar descriptions of the places she sees and the people she meets can make me laugh.
I love books that take sidelong glances at big issues while also telling a rollicking good tale.
Fly by Night is brilliant!!
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