I enjoyed this fast-paced YA steampunk fantasy set in 1800s England. Arabella, the first witch whose magic works with technology, faces great danger at home because there are many witches who do not believe that magic and technology work together and even willing to kill her. So, she is sent with her sister to see if they can figure out a solution to the famine in Ireland and the ill-treatment witches receive there. But they soon find out that things aren’t any safer in Ireland and in England…

This is a world that is filled with the challenges and excitements brought about by the Industrial Revolution as well as class, race and gender prejudices which strictly define a person’s role in society and what they can do. Throw in magic that only women can do creates a rich world of material to mine for storylines. It can be difficult for a writer to give all of these subjects the attention they deserve.

I felt that there were a lot of questions raised in Ireland that were not answered. Also, the problems in Ireland are deep rooted and wouldn’t be solved just by finding a solution to the potato blight. Most farmers still do not have enough arable land to reliably produce food for their families and the hatred of witches isn’t going to go away anytime soon. It feels that Arabella or some other witches would have to go back to Ireland and spend more time there to really begin to solve the problems (which definitely does not seem to be likely to happen any time soon). I do like that the writer is showing that the answer isn’t just in magic or in technology. Together they can achieve more than just one or the other.

The writer did a good job in showing the volatile passion of a teenager. Arabella acts like she is the only one who has ever seen some of the problems with the witch trials (that took place in the first book). She doesn’t see there are problems with just deciding to change everything out of the blue. There are real reasons why they can’t be (though sometimes that is just an excuse for nothing to ever change). Arabella just wants to charge into situations and change them. She begins to see in this book that the world is more complex. But that doesn’t mean that she can’t do some things immediately.

I also thought the writer did a good job in show how encompassing love (or infatuation, it is too early to tell) is as a teenager. Arabella and her beau are sweet together but not everything is perfect in paradise…

This is the second in a series. I didn’t read the first one and I could understand what was going on. But I definitely felt that I was missing things by not having read the first book before this one. I would be interested in reading others in this series.