I quite enjoyed this one. There's quite a few characters to keep track of like others have said, but as the story goes on it does focus in a lot more on who's important and who's not, with the extraneous cast getting little to nothing later.

The main thing I really like here though is Freddie. His presence really adds that sense of childlike wonder to the book, you can imagine kids reading this and seeing themselves in him. He's important, but not in a way that the actually really affects the story, in a way that makes him interesting, but still enough of a blank slate for kids to project themselves onto. And everything with him and Rose in this story is just lovely. I also genuinely couldn't tell if they were going to kill him off in the end. The book had me believe they might for just a moment.

This era of London is also just such a brilliant setting, and the clockwork motif does just add so much to getting you into the vibe of the setting. The description of the clockwork characters reminded me a lot of The Girl in the Fireplace, and it's really interesting to see where they're the same, and where they differ, I like the fact that here they're very much treated as robot characters rather than just robots. I also really like the descriptions of how London has changed so much in such little time, the moment of Rose running down Embankment and comparing it to Rose, so similar but so different, was really nice, though maybe that's my londoner bias coming through.

Overall though, while there's a lot to like, while I enjoyed the twists and turns and the ending set piece, I dont' think anything really 'wowed' me enough to rate it higher than a 7/10