What an enjoyable read! So vividly written, I could visualise every winding street and twisting chimney of Rotherweird - a town removed from the rest of England by ancient laws and fiercely guarded secrets...

If you like Ben Aaronovitch, Neil Gaiman or Susanna Clarke, this book is for you!

Well - Rotherweird by name & Rather Weird by nature. This is definitely an unusual book.

Rotherweird is a small town in England which is isolated from the rest of the country. The residents are not allowed to research their past and don't employ modern technology such as petrol vehicles, computers or even telephones. It is attached to a fantasy land via a series of magic tiles. I won't attempt to further precis the plot as it is actually rather convoluted & I'd loose you in seconds. Suffice to say there are a great number of unusual characters & a lot of strange goings on.

Although I did enjoy this book I wouldn't call it a light read or even an easy read. You do need to keep your wits about you all all times. There are flashbacks to the Elizabethan period which often make no sense at the time but will mostly become clear as you progress. I regret not taking the time to write a full cast list for myself which would have made things easier particularly when people had more than one name or when names were similar.

I struggled a bit with the ending of this book. It was all going well and we had arrived at a clear climax, had a brief summary and I expected the book to end. It didn't and just got rather tedious. The last few chapters were unnecessary in my opinion and could have been better adapted to the beginning of the next installment.

I have called this a marmite book because it is so obviously going to be a book you either love or hate. I enjoyed it and if weren't for the extra chapters on the end I would have loved the book. I can see, however, that many people are just not going to want to stick with this and will find it like wading through treacle.

I loved Rotherweird and its residents as well as the whole concept of the attached extra place, Lost Acre. I was quite happy to read through the intricacies and deal with the convoluted twists. There is some wonderful writing and some great characters - a fantastic coracle race and details of the Polk Brothers inventions spring instantly to mind. There is something very Heath Robinson about them!

I can see that this book is designed to lead to another. There are definitely things to be resolved. I shall be looking out for the next installment of Rotherweird!

This is my review from Goodreads, which will be cross-posted to my blog in May.

ROTHERWEIRD was, in short, rather a weird book -- no pun intended. It was quite slow-paced, as well as being reasonably long, so that it felt longer than it was; there were lots of very intricate descriptions of people and places, as well as descriptions of places as though they were people. (Well, buildings, at least, and Caldecott didn't make a habit of it, but there were a couple of these and they were distinctive.)

It was slightly difficult to ever get a grip on the world it was portraying. The eponymous town of Rotherweird is isolated and anachronistic compared to the rest of the country, that much is made clear over and over again -- but I honestly never fully figured out what time period the rest was set in. I assumed it was modern because there was a brief reference to computers, but a lot of the characters' attitudes felt... I don't know. I don't even know how to better phrase it than 'attitudes', which makes it seem like I mean ideology. I just meant there was nothing in the 'outsider' characters that really set them aside from the Rotherweirders other than their lack of local knowledge.

Rotherweird's distinctive feature is that it forbids the teaching of history any earlier than 1800. (Honestly, this is not that remarkable where schools are concerned; our syllabus started in the 1880s for the most part. I haven't even done the Tudors since I was about eight, and they're usually very over-taught.) It also forbids investigation into its own history, largely because it's not that savoury and they don't want a repeat of past events.

This made for an odd book because the reader, like some of the characters, can't really get to grips with the PRESENT of the town due to not knowing the PAST. There are glimpses here and there of the pertinent scenes, but it takes quite a long time for these to build up a concrete picture, which I guess is the idea. Even then, it's impossible to figure out the plot points for yourself or to predict anything, because you're just not given enough information until events had already taken place.

That was probably my biggest problem of the book: the ending is paced so that it all happens somewhat abruptly and with little input from the characters who are supposedly the key players in all that's going on. They're left to explain it all to us, based mainly on information we didn't have or were given only in the briefest passing remarks, which leaves it all feeling a little abrupt. In a shorter book, that wouldn't have been a problem, but after so much build-up I felt it needed a bit more of a dramatic ending.

I also never really got particularly invested in the characters -- although that might be because it took a long time for me to tell the Rotherweirders apart, because they all had weird names and several of them began with the same letter. Oh, many of them were sympathetic or likeable enough, but they didn't evoke an emotional connection from me, possibly because I didn't feel I knew enough about them to MAKE that connection.

(On the subject of not knowing enough about them, there's a female character whose name we never even learn. She's always referred to as 'the actress' and while that's rather the point, that she doesn't have an identity we know of and she's anonymous and silent, it was frustrating that she didn't seem to have more agency, especially as there were only a couple of significant female characters who did, both of whom the male protagonist is interested in sleeping with at one point or another.)

I saw comparisons drawn between this book and 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell', which I don't think is entirely inaccurate -- in terms of writing style, they have a fair amount in common, as this too had that detailed, old-fashioned style. However, while this did feature another world, it lacked the Otherworldliness that characterised JS&MN and which made me like it so much: this, when placed into comparison with the other, felt a lot more bogged down in the physical world, in a way I wasn't entirely sure I liked. That's a matter of personal taste and not a judgement on its quality, though (I'm big on fairies).

There were some bits and pieces I really liked, including a very brief but revealing (and somewhat touching) scene between Gregorius and Ferox towards the ending that explains a lot about the characters. However, on the whole, the conclusion was rather a disappointment, because it felt so abrupt and so out of the character's control. In places, too, I was really confused, notably with the 'bubbles' (a sort of flying device), which the characters appear to understand long before they're explained to the reader and which I felt a bit thrown by.

The book has illustrations, but the eARC only includes a couple of them (so occasionally you'd find "illustration to come" in the middle of a sentence where the formatting had gone awry -- that was sometimes amusing). I couldn't see them in detail, since a Kindle's black and white display is never going to do them justice, but I liked what little I saw of them, and I imagine they'll add something to the finished book.

It's a couple of days since I read the book as my thoughts were very muddled when I'd finished and I didn't know what to say about it. Having given it time to stew, I'd say that I'm remembering more of the negatives that caught my eye than the positives that won me over, which is swaying me towards a lower rating. Despite some strong points, then, ROTHERWEIRD is only getting three stars from me, but I might make an effort to seek out a library copy to see the illustrations in full.

Rotherweird is the debut novel by Andrew Caldecott. A hybrid of historical and science fiction, I was unsure what to expect. My experience of debut's particularly in the SF or fantasy genre has until now been a mixed bag, leaning mostly towards the poorly written and poorly plotted. Rotherweird however is something else entirely, Andrew Caldecott weaves together a mystical tale of suspense and adventure, mixed in with the macabre and my favourite period in history; Tudor England.


The opening lines see Mary Queen of Scots, desperate after the loss of a baby who may never have even been a baby at all. It appears at first that this story will focus mainly on this time period, but it is merely setting the scene. The reader is almost immediately whisked away to modern times and the mysterious town of Rotherweird.

Standing alone amidst the rest of the UK, Rotherweird is a town where everyone is smart, particularly when it comes to science, nobody really leaves and it is rare that outsiders come in, other than to teach, trade or perform at one of Rotherweird's many fairs. Enter four new players; The Actress set to play Lady Slickstone, the mysterious and sinister Sir Virgil Slickstone, their faux son and finally the new history teacher Mr Jonah Oblong.


It becomes immediately obvious to the newcomers that things in Rotherweird Are more than just a little... weird (pun fully intended). For Mr Oblong especially, despite being the history teacher, he is neither allowed to know or to teach any of Rotherweird's history, nor any general history before the Cusp of the 19th century. Because Rotherweird has a secret that it doesn't want anyone to find out for fear that the bad things that happened which forced Elizabeth II to cast it adrift, might happen again.


The characters in this book, are incredibly well written, from Orelia Roc, part owner of the antique shop Baubles and Relics to Hayman Salt the resident outsider and horticulturists. All of them have motives but the imminent threat of destruction brings them all together.

Andrew Caldecott's ability to create and shape worlds and the characters in them, draws the reader into an intense narrative of plot and subtext that keeps you guessing until the very end. You don't even know you have suspicions until the answer is revealed.

Enchanting and beautifully written, I can only hope that there is going to be a Rotherweird II and SOON!

A highly unusual book, a kind of portal fantasy/historical fantasy/contemporary urban fantasy blend. It reminds me most of Robert Holdstock or Charles de Lint, though less ominous in tone than either.

There are a great many characters, and according to the author's afterword, there were originally a lot more. I had a cold when I read it, so my brain was fuzzy, and I sometimes had to think hard to remember who a character was when they were mentioned after being offstage for a while. I felt that it could have been achieved with a tighter cast; in particular, I didn't really see why the villain found it necessary to supply himself with not only a fake wife, but a fake son, since the son never seemed to contribute to his plans in any way. I could see why the author involved him (he played a minor, but important, role in the plot), but I couldn't figure out why the villain did so. The "son" was also oddly subservient to the villain, given the rest of his character.

One thing I disliked was that strong, fulfilling relationships between men and women were conspicuous by their absence. As well as the fake marriage, there are a couple of marriages which have obviously been contracted for political reasons, and in which the wife is a cypher, never developed as a character. Another marriage is threatened by the husband's drinking. I can only remember one relationship (the publican and his wife) where both partners are developed and effective, and where they don't seem to be in conflict, but that's because they don't seem to be in anything; they take action separately, but don't really have a scene together where they interact. The outsider who is the best candidate for "central character" (he's not really a protagonist, or less so than some of the other characters, but we spend a lot of time with him) <spoiler>never manages to develop a satisfactory relationship with any of the several women he's attracted to</spoiler>.

The point of view is, I suppose, omniscient, though it mostly follows one character per scene (fooling me for a while into thinking it was third person limited), occasionally switching heads mid-scene. This is necessary in part because there's no one protagonist in the complicated plot.

The setting is a town separated by statute from England at large, to preserve a terrible secret. It's an odd mixture; it has a long tradition of scientific inquiry (something best done while <i>not</i> isolated, in general), and the school - a secondary school, not a university - produces cutting-edge research, yet there's little evidence of modern technology; the scientific prowess of some of the characters is an idea more than it is a developed element of the plot. The overall feel of the town is a lot closer to its Elizabethan origins than it is to the present day, which directly contradicts the strong imperative to forget about the past and forge towards the future. I felt that this aspect hadn't been fully thought through.

It's sounding as if I didn't enjoy it, but I did. The mysterious, and never fully explained, portals to the other world, the Elizabethan backstory, the various mysteries, and the joint maneuverings of the large cast kept me involved and interested. I did think it was, at one and the same time, over-elaborate and yet not completely worked out, but it shows a lot of promise, and I will be watching for the sequel.