I read Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti after The Sacred Band because I was certain it would be very different, which it definitely was, and because it seemed massively unlikely to give me the same kind issues with its treatment of gender, which it did not.
Mechanique is a fantasy novel about a circus that travels through what the A.V. Club neatly sums up as “an indeterminate near-Earth that exists not so much in a post-apocalypse as in a frozen, perpetual mid-collapse.” There’s magic in the circus, but what is only slowly revealed over the course of the book (and how is almost entirely left aside, which is fine with me but may annoy others). Also revealed non-linearly is the history and relationships of the circus’s members, which then shapes their reaction to the plot, which admittedly takes a while to manifest.
The thing about this book is the prose, which the sample chapters give a very good sense of. I could never quite fall through it, myself. This is mostly personal taste, though on reflection, the fact that I liked somewhat better several short stories about the Circus (particularly “Study, for Solo Piano”) suggests that the stylization in the novel may be a little more heightened than optimal. However, despite that, I still read it twice and found that a lot of it lingered in my mind. So if the sample chapters interest you at all, I would say it’s worth trying. As Abigail Nussbaum’s more critical review in Strange Horizons puts it, the book “reaches for wonder and horror,” and even though I was not perfectly compatible with its style, for me it succeeded in attaining both.
Disclaimer: the author is a friend.