Rosen's debut novel is thoroughly modernist, paying constant homage. The most overt references are to Twelfth Night and The Importance of Being Earnest and no wonder, because the plot of All Men of Genius takes on shades of Shakespearean comedy and Wildean farse even as it purports to be a steampunk adventure (more accurately it's a gearpunk adventure, but who am I to argue with the marketing departments?).
Our hero is Violet (get it?!), a mechanical genius who decides to impersonate her brother so she can attend an elite all-male technical school. The headmaster is a duke named Ernest (get it?!) who is flanked by his ward Cecily (get it?!). With the help of her friend Jack (get it?!), she must keep them all fooled without being thwarted by Mal Volio (see what he did there?!?!?!). Also, there are rabbits named Shakespeare and Oscar. Rosen is not a man who suffers from an abundance of subtlety.
Like the farse and the Shakespearean comedy, the story is at its heart a ridiculous conflagration of confused love stories. That Rosen is able to keep all of these pieces more or less in the air at once is actually fairly impressive, and the story is at its best when it's playing with dramatic irony and orchestrating bizarre love quadrangles. The structure of the story, however, is a bit bewildering. It's told from the third person omniscient perspective (Rosen handles the head-hopping more gracefully than, say, Gail Carriger, so I didn't actively hate it... very much). This is pretty standard for books set in that period and allows for some abbreviated storytelling, but it's still a little jarring if you're not used to it. Rosen lacks the J.K. Rowling talent of spreading a plot over a school term, so the pacing is at times uneven. At the 40% mark, the school session was still in its first week. Around the two-thirds mark we start getting elaborate back stories for supporting characters who had been fairly one-dimensional up to that point. While it's interesting to learn that Professor Lothario (get it?!) Prism is colorblind, and that's why he uses those complex lenses that made him seem like such a caricature, it's a weird thing to trot out in the middle of Act III.
And sometimes it's just clunky. Mysteries are pondered and abandoned. An entire subplot about a machine imitating a specific person is wholly unnecessary. The big action set piece is telegraphed pretty transparently, although it is executed with skill. Also, this is a book with an agenda. The gender-politics aren't bash-you-over-the-head up front... well, okay, they really are. And not just gender, we get gay rights pleas as well. Not that his message was wrong, per se, it just felt a wee bit preachy at times. But for all its warts, AMoG is ridiculously fun. It's light-hearted enough to not take itself very seriously and smart enough to enjoy the more over-the-top laughs that such non-seriousness affords. And while it may be mashed together from familiar parts, Rosen fits the pieces together into a tightly-wound and enjoyable whole.
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