Meh.
Not bad over all, but not what i expected.
I wanted to say that i should start reading the blurbs before the books, but that wouldn’t hav helpt here.
The title makes it sound like steampunk, but this is just D&D-stile fantasy. Just yur standard campaign put into novel form. Yu even get a few random monsters thrown in at the end as the party is moving thru the unknown territory.
What really threw me off from locating it were the cigarettes. I know that “anacronism” isn’t really a thing in a fantasy setting. Still, that made me wonder if this wasn’t more of a steampunk stile world after all, which it wasn’t, regardless of what the Clockwork Boys turn out to be in the end.

Oh, that’s why it was so short. It’s not so much the first part of a series but the first half of what is basically a single novel. (I presume. I don’t want to spend the money for two books on one. Especially when the first half wasn’t that great.) I blame Tolkien and people calling Lord of the Rings a Trilogy instead of one much too long novel.
Starting about ½ thru i wondered how they would actually deal with the, yu know, Clockwork Boys when they spent so much time on the road. Turns out, not. That is, maybe, part two. All the Clockwork Boys do here is literally just march by once.