In general: 

 Although this book was super slow, I enjoyed most of it. I loved the whole Scarlet Pimpernel side of it. The characters were lovable and they had a lot of funny/sweet moments (one of my favourites was when somebody was translating things to another person during a fight). There was a love triangle, which I didn’t enjoy. What I did love was the climax chapter, where all the paragraphs were linked. That was super cool. 

 There were some things that were rather confusing/not as great: 

 - The worldbuilding. Clocks, mills and pianos are illegal, but violins aren’t and at one point they play McCartney, even though information from the world before is super rare. I wonder how anyone in this world gets anything done and what counts as a machine and what doesn’t. 

 - Mrs. Rathbone’s personality was very confusing, going from tolerating to liking to disliking to loving to hating her.

There’s a plot twist at the end that I could have seen coming if her characterisation hadn’t been so inconsequential, I just thought the author didn’t know what she wanted.

 

 - Things that were repeated too many times: 

 1) The villain trusts in Fate; everything is in Fate’s hand 

 2) Rene likes to sit with his elbows on his knees 

 3) Wesson’s Guide is EVERYWHERE and has no real relevance (is it a reference to something I don’t know?) 

 4) Rene has a noticable pulse at the base of his throat 

 5) LeBlanc is sexist 

 6) There’s a white streak in LeBlanc’s hair 

 7) Rene is always flipping a coin 

 -

There’s a fakeout death. And when someone does die, they bury him… even though he exploded. How?

 

 - The Eiffel tower is on the cover even though it was destroyed and not rebuilt yet in the book. 

 - There’s some more feminism stuff, where corsets are bad and if you assume a woman wants a bunch of kids you are underestimating her (even though the picture painted was actually nice) 

 - These quotes are dumb: 

 <blockquote>[She was] fascinated that it [his hair] felt like hair – it was so red and male she’d half thought it might feel like something different.</blockquote> 

 <blockquote>Her grief for both of them was flavored with guilt the way salt flavors the sea; she could taste it in the tears.</blockquote>