Review: Mr Gearheart, by Emily Owen

Key Selling Points

• From the author of The Mechanical Maestro and The Copper Chevalier, a new story following the Abernathy siblings as they face an enigmatic adversary.
• Character-driven story centred around three genius siblings.
• A steampunk-tinged tale with Gothic overtones sure to enthral fans of clockwork, androids and the Victorian era alike.
• Immersive world filled with colourful characters.

Blurb

1863

Six years have passed at Ravenfeld Hall. The Abernathy siblings’ fortunes continue to improve as George and Douglas’s android-building business thrives. But change looms on the horizon. Douglas’s engagement to the sweet, charming Clara Marsden threatens to take him from his family, while sister Molly contemplates whether a future with the man she loves means sacrificing her independence and academic pursuits.

Then the family face more pressing concerns…

One night, George’s latest invention escapes the Hall. Four months later, a charismatic inventor by the name of Gearhart appears in London, with an intellect to rival that of the Abernathys’. George senses there’s something sinister about the mysterious Mr Gearhart, who’s planning to unveil an invention that could change the world. But does he have far grander ambitions? And can George uncover the truth about him in time?

My Review

Thanks to Anne of Random Things Tours for organising this tour and to the author for sending me a copy of this novel. I hadn’t read anything by this author before, but I enjoyed this novel so much I’ve bought the first two in the series.

We meet George, Douglas and Molly Abernathy in their grand home, inherited by George in the earlier books, preparing for a visit from the Marsden family. Douglas and Miss Clara Marsden are engaged, but her family hasn’t met his.

It’s a disaster. The guests are pushy, the hosts are hostile, the resident androids destroy the table.

Meanwhile, down in George’s workshop, a computer has developed sentience and escapes into the night.

Months later, as George and Douglas prepare to show off their latest works at the Inventors Society, a new man arrives. Mr Gearheart. He’s invented ‘the tele-texter’, a handheld device for sending and receiving telegraphs. Something about him strikes George as ‘not right’ and he soon discovers that he’s correct. ]

Douglas is pining for Miss Marsden, engaging in dangerous experiments and managing the day-to-day affairs of the android business. He is happy to see George with a new friend in Mr Gearheart, but concerned when he believes his brother has started drinking again.

Molly, on the other hand, is busy playing with a rather strange poison and figuring out her relationship with Arthur, her landscaper boyfriend. Marriage is in the air, but will they coax his parents around?

The three are eventually invited to a dinner party and all the threads are pulled together, resulting in two captured assassins and enemies otherwise defeated.

I really like the Abernathy siblings and their friends, and the plot kept me thoroughly entertained.

I’m pretty certain George is Autistic, and the other two have traits. They’re all very loyal to each other, protective and caring. Like many autistic people, George feels strongly, but his face doesn’t show it, so people assume he has no empathy or feelings. He says in the book that he never said he felt nothing, people assumed it about him. It’s true, for a long time the consensus was that autistic people lacked empathy, didn’t understand ‘normal’ feelings or social conventions, and were damaged. Actually, some people still think that. Like any group of people, some autistic people feel little empathy, some feel average levels of empathy and some are hyper empathetic. Feelings are complicated by alexithymia and our faces just don’t show our feelings the same way non-autistic people do. The author does a really good job of expressing the inner ‘big feelings’ behind the ‘calm’ mask. It’s usually that we’re so overwhelmed we can’t process. I don’t know whether it was a deliberate choice to make George autistic, but if it was, and the author isn’t autistic herself, she’s done some extensive research to get it right.

Molly and her experiments are particularly interesting to me, as a gardener and biology lover. Laced in with the murderous fantasies and wild plant growth, are actual biological truths – plants can chemically ‘talk’ to each other in their root systems and do aid each other. They are assisted by mycorrhizal systems (fungi!). How cool would it be if we could understand plants and help them? What could we learn about the soil and what it needs, if only we could hear the plants, fungi and bacteria ‘talking’ to each other?

Douglas, of the three, is the one most comfortable in society, although even he doesn’t particularly enjoy it, other than visiting his friends Dick and Theo. He’d rather be messing with his airships and spaceship. The ADHDer adrenalin and dopamine junky who can spend hours hyper focussed on building his ships but gets distracted when doing mundane things, like checking the equipment is all there and safe. (Not that I’m criticising ADHDers, you’re cool. Douglas reminds me of two of my cousins, one of whom had ‘car’ as his first word.)

The author tackles the issue of AI while sending her characters on a journey of discovery about themselves and the future. Mr Gearheart is the ‘Silicon Valley entrepreneur’ archetype on steroids and without the weaknesses of death and disease. He sees humanity as a mess to be tidied up and seeks to impose that tidiness through controlling lives and eugenics. I think I know where Emily Owen got her influence for that. Or at least we’re swimming in similar waters.

The tele texters are obviously a steampunk pager analogue, or early mobile phone where texting was the only extra function, and people really do give up their privacy, forgetting the data is collected by the network provider, by the search engine owner, by the social media company. You can’t really escape it these days, most of us carry a computer in our pockets that track our movements, our spending, what we read, what we support, who we’re friends with. The ever hungry algorithm sends us the news it thinks we should read/see/hear and reinforces pre-existing problems.

Mr Gearheart’s plan for humanity is a distorted form of socialism, as understood by people who don’t really understand socialism and think it can be installed from the top down. It has all the outward signs – education, healthcare, improved lives for everyone – but underneath it relies on totalitarian ideas about who is worthy of receiving those improvements, how those things should be applied, and eugenics. Lots of eugenics. Eugenics was very fashionable in the later 19th century, right up until the 1950s. If you’re sterilising disabled people, or people from an ethnicity you don’t like, that’s eugenics. So, actually, in some places, it’s still happening.

The Abernathy’s don’t agree at all, which leads to explosions and blood on evening clothes.

I enjoyed this book. If you haven’t read the first two you can read this as a stand-alone novel, there’s enough background to understand events and characters. The writing is well-paced and easy to read. The science and technology is very cool.

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Author Bio

Emily Owen studied English Language and Literature at the University of Leeds, and completed her Masters by Research in 2018. She works as a Digital Executive and lives in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. She self-published her debut novel The Mechanical Maestro in 2020, which is the first book in her series following the adventures of the Abernathy family and their clockwork creations. The second book in the series, The Copper Chevalier was released in March 2022.



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PublishDecember 11 8:48 am

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Excerpt

The tele texters are obviously a steampunk pager analogue, or early mobile phone where texting was the only extra function, and people really do give up their privacy, forgetting the data is collected by the network provider, by the search engine owner, by the social media company.

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Author Bio

Emily Owen studied English Language and Literature at the University of Leeds, and completed her Masters by Research in 2018. She works as a Digital Executive and lives in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. She self-published her debut novel The Mechanical Maestro in 2020, which is the first book in her series following the adventures of the Abernathy family and their clockwork creations. The second book in the series, The Copper Chevalier was released in March 2022.