Elizabeth Hand
…an extravagantly wondrous and admirable first novel inspired by The Tempest…the work it most resembles is Angela Carter's hallucinatory tour de force The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972, released in this country as The War of Dreams), whose protagonist also makes his way through a nightmarish alternate future to confront a perpetual motion machine. Yet Palmer's vision is his own, with its Henry Dargeresque dream sequences and Crystal Palace cityscapes: an elegy for our own century and the passing of the power of the word, written and spoken.
—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
Palmer's dazzling debut explodes with energy and invention on almost every page. In a steampunky alternate reality, genius inventor Prospero Taligent promises the 100 kids he's invited to his daughter Miranda's birthday party that they will have their “heart's desires fulfilled.” When young Harold Winslow says he wants to be a storyteller, he sets in motion an astonishing plot that will eventually find him imprisoned aboard a giant zeppelin, the Chrysalis, powered by Taligent's greatest invention, a (probably faulty) perpetual motion machine. As Harold tells his story from his airborne prison, a fantastic and fantastical account unfolds: cities full of Taligent's mechanical men, a virtual island where Harold and Miranda play as children, the Kafkaesque goings-on in the boiler rooms and galleries of Taligent's tower. Harold's narration is interspersed with dreams, diary entries, memos and monologues from the colorful supporting cast, and the dialogue, both overly formal and B-movie goofy (“I'm afraid the death rays are just a bunch of science fiction folderol”), offers comic counterpoint. This book will immediately connect with fans of Neal Stephenson and Alfred Bester, and will surely win over readers who'd ordinarily pass on anything remotely sci-fi. (Mar.)\
Library Journal
Palmer's debut drops elements from Shakespeare's The Tempest into a steampunk setting. The engines and mechanical men of inventor and industrialist Prospero Taligent have driven miracles from the world with the brute logic of technology. Young Harold Winslow's chance wandering at an amusement park brings him into Prospero's orbit. Invited to the birthday party of Taligent's beloved but objectified daughter Miranda, Harold begins a lifetime connection to a family plunging ever deeper into operatic madness. Palmer conjures unforgettable images—boys and girls carried to a skyscraper party by mechanical demons and angels, a "unicorn" created by pounding an ivory horn into the skull of a horse, for instance. VERDICT This clever, creative debut will appeal to readers who like literary and unusual fantasy. The emotional core of the story, metaphysical philosophy, visual splendor, and quirky humor are all strong, but, unfortunately, these elements aren't always blended gracefully. When Palmer learns to meld his strengths and avoid distracting asides, he'll be an exciting author indeed. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/09; library marketing.]—Neil Hollands, Williamsburg Regional. Lib., VA
Kirkus Reviews
An intoxicatingly ambitious debut novel that somehow seems to encapsulate everything the author believes about everything. This reads like a science-fiction update of The Tempest as rewritten by Jonathan Lethem. It takes place in the early years of the 20th century, though this is a past reimagined by a futurist, filled with mechanical men who have brought the age of miracles to an end. It begins aboard a zeppelin called the Chrysalis, where narrator Harold Winslow finds himself flying in perpetuity, along with the disembodied voice of his life's love, Miranda, and the corpse of her adoptive father, the (mad, genius) inventor, Prospero Taligent. With a memoir addressed to his "imaginary reader," for Winslow has no hope that anyone will ever see these pages, the narrator recounts the pivotal incidents in his life, sometimes in the first person, often in the third. The most crucial among them is his Willy Wonka-esque invitation to the tenth birthday of Miranda, isolated from the world in a tower, where her father invents the machines that transform the world and threaten to steal its soul. At the party, Prospero promises each of the 100 children whom he has gathered that all will achieve their heart's desire. Harold wants to become a writer, and in fact becomes a writer of greeting-card verse, but the rest of the novel recounts the unlikely fashion through which he fulfills his higher ambition. Though the narrative propulsion seems to lurch and leap, occasionally lacking cohesion (sometimes even coherence), its provocative meditations on life and love, innocence and knowledge, the essence of ever-changing time and its tension with timeless art, and the limits of language as expressedthrough language, make this a parable worth savoring. It walks the tightrope "between madness and genius, between profoundly difficult truths and pure nonsense," without a safety net for either writer or reader. A novel of ideas that holds together like a dream.
