The Hourglass Factory

Book: The Hourglass Factory by Lucy Ribchester

Genre: fiction, sort of murder mystery, feminist, historical

Rating: 7 out of 10 sparkly stars 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌑🌑🌑

I'm not going to lie, this is a book I purchased solely based on its cover. What can I say? I'm a sucker for a pretty book. It's navy blue and swirly and asks 'Don't you want to take a trip to the 1900's circus?' To which, if you’re anything like me, the obvious answer, is 'Duh.' It’s all the more enticing because the back cover's praise lures you in with buzz words topics like 'the Titanic', 'Jack the Ripper', 'suffragettes', and ‘fetishism' (although in honesty the novel barely references the Titanic or Jack the Ripper).

To slim it down, The Hourglass Factory is a story that follows androgynous female reporter Frankie George in her attempts uncover the truth surrounding the disappearance of famed trapeze artist, Ebony Diamond, and ultimately prevent Diamond’s murder. It’s definitely a plot that draws you in, pairing London’s (forgive me the cliché) seedy underbelly with the pop and dazzle of circus life, contrasting fear with tones of feminism.

Overall, I have to say I liked this book. It started a bit slow, but stick through the first 100 pages and the intensity picks up very quickly. I am, admittedly, biased towards this time period (late 19th century, early 20th) and love me a good British setting, but regardless of my preferences Ribchester creates a locale that is both recognizable and intriguing for the reader. She introduces a number of divergent characters — snake charmers, tiger tamers, and rich old gossips — that definitely hold attention and add to the abundance of color in the story. And to be honest, who doesn’t want to read about a feminist trapeze artist who disappears while she is dangling from a starry ceiling?

All this being said, however, Ribchester lessened the strength of her book by trying to juggle too much. By incorporating themes of feminism (through the infiltration of the suffragette movement), fetishism (through the introduction of men corseting themselves), sexuality and gender presentation (look no further than the novel’s main character), and societal deviancy, the book lost poignancy on truly hashing out any of these very important topics. Not to mention the fact that Ribchester was so concerned with placing excessive red herrings, the final twist lost its relevancy. She spent so much of the novel volleying between the suffragettes, the tightlacing men, the corruption within the circus, the misogyny within the newspaper business, and the sordid life of the Scotland Yard’s main detective, that the conclusion’s story strings became overly convoluted and ultimately disconnected. If Ribchester had removed even one or two of these thematic dialogues — or perhaps if she had done a better job of interlacing them like the corsets she so lovingly describes— she could have given so much more strength to her main goal of creating a feminist novel and provided clarity and gravitas to what should have been the book’s shocking conclusion.

Ribchester also struggled with historical accuracy, a point she admits to in a Historical Note at the end of the book. For some this is a factor that is irrelevant to their reading experience, but I think it’s important to mention because for some it can disrupt the narrative’s validity and create ripples in the believability of the setting. (An example of this is her constant reference to the Bow Street Runners who were long gone by the start of the twentieth century, having been replaced by the detectives of Scotland Yard in the mid 1800’s).

In total, this book has incredible bones and a fascinating storyline, it just needed to be pared down to have true impact on the controversial topics it attempts to engage.

To view or purchase this book, here is its link on Amazon ​(displayed with a different cover than the one I own)

https://www.amazon.com/Hourglass-Factory-Lucy-Ribchester/dp/1471139301/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502477954&sr=8-1&keywords=the+hourglass+factory

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