Wow okay, so I was expecting some middling steam punk story, not an investigation into free will.

The story follows our protagonist Jax gaining their freedom, and subsequent flight. Jax is a clakker, a robot made by a combination of magic and clockwork. Clakkers are slaves of the humans, often being thought unthinking, unfeeling machines.

It's set in an alternative steam-punk America where the dutch are the controlling force, and they have been at war with the french for years. Steam power never really took off, however the Clakkers did. Clakkers are used to perform more or less everything steam did.

The things that worked really well in this book was the plot the characters. It felt like a potentially real world and was pretty engaging from start to finish.

The only real place it fell down was on occasion, going into basic epistemology in somewhat of a long rambling tone.

If you've read [b:Kiln People|96478|Kiln People|David Brin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1287261951s/96478.jpg|2300358], some of the ideas will feel similar, however without the noir/cyberpunk tone.