Medical student Felicia Sanchez is only trying to help an injured man when she slips through a time rip and into 19th century New Orleans, one very different than the one she knows from history books.

The only person who can get her home is Professor Seamus Connor, a former convict seeking a quiet life of obscurity. But even the “mad Irishman” knows that recreating a freak accident is next to impossible.

With the help of a local street urchin, they discover that their problems run deeper than solely getting Felicia back to her own time. The three of them must unravel the secrets of a steam engine that operates upon a scientific impossibility and the mysteries of a grand cathedral at the center of town, where clockwork automatons perform for rapt audiences.

But can a convict, a guttersnipe and an accidental time traveler prevent the destruction of a city and the death of thousands? Others are watching, and Felicia may not be the only time traveler in New Orleans.

I enjoyed Heather Blackwood’s Steampunk novel ‘Hounds of Autumn’ (2013), so when I needed a time-travel novel for Halloween Bingo, I picked ‘The Clockwork Cathedral‘, the first book in her five-book Time Corps series.

I set the book aside at 31% because it wasn’t holding my attention. I suspect that was as much about me as it was about the book. I enjoy Halloween Bingo, but it goes against my nature as a mood reader to have to read specific books at a specific time. This book fell victim to that. I just wasn’t in the mood for a book with a nice, optimistic heroine intent on doing the right thing. 

The setup of the time-slip and the nature of the alternative historic America our heroine, Felicia Sanchez, was stranded in were interesting. I liked that the time travel was accidental and random but hinted at something that could be, and perhaps already had been, turned into a functIoning technology. The New Orleans setting allowed for a diverse cultural milieu and, of course, brought with it an association with supernatural possibilities. I could see the scope for a strong Steampunk story but with the covert injection of a secret advanced technology. Not to mention the opportunity to re-write pre-Civil War American history.

So what was the problem? 

Mostly it was that the characters were too much like concepts or archetypes to be engaging. Actually, that’s probably a little unfair, given that I set the book aside before I reached the halfway mark, I think it was more that Heather Blackwood was assembling Team Underdog -the Irish immigrant professor with a dark past, the liberal minded Latina med school student who has fallen through time, and the street urchin with a talent for the violin who is cross-dressing for her own protection – and I found myself resisting the pressure to cheer for them. I felt like I was reading Dickens turned into speculative fiction. 

My main problem was with the med student, Felicia. She seemed to me to be implausibly naive for a brown-skinned woman who, even in her own time, was working in a profession dominated by entitled white men.

I set the book aside a week ago. I’ve read half a dozen books since, and ‘The Clockwork Cathedral’ hasn’t faded from my imagination yet, so I’m regarding this as ‘Set aside for now’. I may well pick it up again when I’m in the mood for an optimistic adventure. for an optimistic adventure.