Tumen wants to go home so Jack and his crew take him back where they are greeted by his family and friends. Throwing a celebration dinner and story telling cause Jack and his crew to dream of the City of Gold. Waking the next day there are persona non gratis because the amulet leading to the City of Gold is missing and Tumen's great-grandfather is ill. Knowing they did not steal the amulet leads Jack and crew to search the island where a small doll is found with the mark of Madame Minuit upon it. Now they must sail to New Orleans and find Madame and retrieve the amulet.

I enjoyed this story. It starts a little slow but once they hit New Orleans it gets exciting. We find out about Madame Minuit and more about the amulet. We also learn more about Arabella. The ending sets up their next adventure (I hope) and I am ready for it.

The sea rocked asleep, now wakes and answers, a refrain of waves and shale-song. The rain in the sky that is yet to fall, answers; a storm gathers. All the rivers and streams and bogs and lakes and fens and puddles and horse troughs and wishing wells wake and answer, adding their voices: faint and rushing, purling and gurgling, muddy and clear. The child looks up. For the first time she can see the stars! She smiles at them, and the stars look back at her and shiver. Then they begin to burn brighter, with renewed fever, in the deep dark ocean of the sky.

Things in Jars was not at all something I would usually pick, but I am so glad I stepped outside my comfort zone and dived into this dark, gory, Victorian fantasy. I loved the characters, I loved the story, and I loved the details that the author included with respect to the medical establishment...even tho it would be a far stretch to call this "historical" fiction. The atmosphere that Kidd created was tremendous, and I loved that she conjured up settings of London, Liverpool, Dublin and other places without resorting to popular cliches that make Victorian settings such a drab in lesser books.

Despite the squalor, gory details of the scenes, the cruelty displayed, and the general meanness of some of the characters, there was a whole lot of warmth in this story, too, and that made the book for me.

Things in Jars was not perfect, but I really liked it.

As with all terrible, wondrous sights, there is a jolt of shock, then a hypnotic fascination, then the uneasy queasiness, then the whole thing starts again; the desire to look and the desire never to have looked in the first place.

I've put this quote behind spoilers because this is exceedingly gross but it also made me laugh out loud because I am reminded of a discussion here on Booklikes a few years ago about the worst things one can do with jelly.

Seriously, don't click the spoiler if you are eating or intending to eat or ... you know ... are otherwise inclined to react to descriptions of gory grossness.

 

‘Then he lopped the doctor’s head off with the doctor’s own saw,’ he recounts. ‘And then – now here’s a puzzle – he sent the doctor’s noodle to the chef at Claridge’s. He requested that it be set in aspic.’

‘Extraordinary.’

‘But then Mr Hoy and I realised: it’s a blue blood thing. Sir Edmund’s ancestors would have taken the heads of their foes on the battlefield and, really, what don’t nobs put in aspic?’

(spoiler show)

 

The story has been dragging for a bit. I hope it picks up again soon.

However, some of the descriptions are so marvellous that I don't really mind:

"London will turn Atlantis. If the rain keeps falling and the river keeps rising. In some parts the omnibus horses swish pastern-deep in water. The conductors wear galoshes and measure the floods with great officiousness using long sticks (two-foot-deep near Victoria Station, three inches at Walthamstow). In Covent Garden cabbages are yesterday’s news and sea kale is all the rage. For asparagus there’s samphire, for turnips there’s kelp.

   Before the rain came, the fish had all but vacated the Thames and those that remained were slime-coated, dull of gill and gritty of flesh. Now nets teem and lines hop with the delicious: crayfish and crabs, salmon and trout. Fresh, clear-eyed and succulent!

   Some people, of a morbid, catastrophising sort of disposition, say the floods, which will only worsen, are divine punishment for the orgies of sin that Londoners enjoy. Which is true: there’s plenty of sin to be had in London. The river will keep rising, they say, London will be washed away.

   Mediums report an increase of communications from the drowned. They rise up squelching and inundate séances, imparting wet footprints and the faint smell of sump-water. Incidents of piracy increase tenfold. The London underworld swaps knives for cutlasses and fighting dogs for parrots. Even those with a full complement of eyes take to wearing patches."

"The pigeons started it. Taking flight as one cooing cloud like the whole thing had long been arranged. The crows watched them leave and then followed, covering the sun with a sudden sweep of night. Then the ravens, the rooks and the jackdaws went too (so that Prudhoe’s flock are the only black birds left in the whole of London, for they would never leave the chemist’s side). Then went the jenny wrens and starlings, sparrows and song thrushes, robins and tits. All gone – scrabbling up into the air, their eyes bright with panic. But the water-birds remain: swans, ducks, herons and cranes, moorhens and cormorants and grebes. Only now they are joined by great marauding flocks of seagulls. And not just gulls, but also storm petrels, oystercatchers and frigate birds, crakes by the dozen, plovers and lapwings. Puffins perch on Nelson’s Column and guillemots prabble over the Houses of Parliament. Kittiwakes roost on rooftops and gannets descend on Covent Garden. Maybe the water-birds bring with them wetland winds and marine breezes, for the haze begins to dissipate and the sun, very briefly, shines. And the air is lit up visible and is beautiful – soot glitter, smoke dew and the delicate mist of unborn raindrops shine above every Londoner."

That is quite a scene. Like something from Hitchcock's The Birds, only with Puffins. Puffins are no use in a Hitchcock film because they instantly make you giggle rather than instill you with dread.

Oh, and because I can't go and visit my waddling friends at the moment, here's a reminder of their cuteness:

(Orkney, 2016)