This book started out really promising, and I was convinced it would be 5* for me during the first half, but...it didn't quite do it for me.

What I loved from page 1 on was the style. It's beautiful, it's immersive, I could envision everything so crystal clearly - I saw the world, I heard its sound, I could sense its movements and its scents and all the emotions in it. It's a beautiful painting of Victorian England (and occasionally Japan a decade earlier). I also thought all the characters were incredibly interesting at the start, but...

...the second half or last third or so doesn't really hold up. A lot of interesting things are touched upon, and then it doesn't go much of anywhere with it. There is a mystery set up at the start that dims into the background completely and is finally resolved with a few lines of dialogue, all of Grace's conflicts (with her family, the other female students, the university, science itself) are discarded for the sake of her being something of an arbitrary antagonist, and all the mystery surrounding the titular watchmaker is resolved in a way I found rather underwhelming.

The ending leaves a lot of things said and then untouched and unreflected. Characters do things and make choices, and that in itself is interesting, but no one ever talks about it, and some things are just shrugged off. Even in a love drama, saying "I did it for love" or "I thought it was the right thing to do" isn't a free pass out of, at the very least, reflection - but it's all kind of glossed over. I think what disappoints me the most is that in all the beauty this book has to offer, it ends up still just a painting: A record of a time, a bit of pretty language, a promise of more, but if you look behind it, there's still just an empty concrete wall.