A Son of the Rock

Tor, 2017, 180 p.

This is the second in Newman’s Industrial Magic series set in a Victorian era where magic, overseen by The Royal Society of the Esoteric Arts, is the major power source which made Britain pre-eminent. The first, Brother’s Ruin, I reviewed here.

Heroine Charlotte Gunn still wishes nothing more than to be an illustrator and (perhaps) to marry her fiancé, George, but her magical ability, which must be kept concealed or normal life will be lost to her forever, is a curse (as well as a boon.) To control it she is being tutored in secret by Magus Thomas Hopkins, whom she finds almost irresistibly attractive, but as a magus he is of course forbidden to marry.

The plot centres around the mill in Manchester which her apprentice magus brother Ben helps to run. Machines are being destroyed mysteriously and he suspects (shock! horror!) socialists are to blame and asks her to go undercover there to find out who is responsible since his failure may cause his rival trainee magus, Paxton, to oust him from the post or even to be prosecuted.

With some reluctance Charlotte agrees but this plan also coincides with Magus Hopkins’s hopes to expose the mill’s owner and Royal Society adept Ledbetter (the baddie from Brother’s Ruin) as a crook.

The conditions Charlotte finds in the mill are appalling. The noise is atrocious, the atmosphere hot and humid, the food dreadful, enough to turn anyone socialist. She can barely get through each day. It soon transpires, though, that the damage to the machines is not due to sabotage but to esoteric causes. Moreover, the working of the machines themselves is having a deleterious effect on the life force of the workers.

All diverting enough but no more. It is, though, a YA book.