An exciting fantasy debut where Stephanie Garber meets Iron Widow.
Eighteen-year-old mixed race factory workers and best friends Eliza and Jules live hand to mouth on the fringes of Ikarian society, but they don’t expect to live long. Finally pushed to the edge when her abusive mother and stepfather put her out onto the streets and desperately wanting more from life, Eliza, a talented thief, hatches a plan to escape the poverty of Coketown.
She sets her sights on the queen’s Fleet of Wonders—an elite naval competition—where the brightest minds in the country are recruited to invent a weapon deadly enough to win another brewing war with Ikaria’s neighbor. The winning team will be bestowed with gold, land and power.
Eliza and Jules steal their way onto the Belladonna, the crown vessel of the Queen’s fleet. Their crewmates are the best of the best. There’s Charlotte whose deadly charm is only outmatched by her lethal way with a sabre. There’s Pierre, who is as imperious as he is handsome and will one day inherit the very factory Eliza and Jules escaped; he’s also the most powerful smith in a generation with the ability to bend metal to his will. Arthur is a renowned mathematician and Suman is trained in the art of medicine. To Jules’s delight, Suman is also a poet.
Together, this unlikely group take to the high seas racing against time to be the first crew to create a new and powerful weapon or die trying. And dying is very much on the table. All the while, Eliza embraces the magic she has kept buried her entire life as she plays a seductive game of will they or won’t they with both Pierre and Charlotte. Meanwhile Jules embraces a new lease on life and allows himself to fall in love for the first time.
As the competition heats up, secrets unravel, romances and rivalries change fortunes and bonds break, Eliza and Jules will discover who they are and what they’re really made of when war finally comes.
