Book review: The Nine Pound Hammer by John Claude Bemis

In the first book in Bemis’ Clockwork Dark series, a kind of folklore Jedi called Ramblers once walked the country, righting wrongs. But the Ramblers were taken down one by one, defeated by an evil abomination known only as the Gog. Now a new group of young heroes—including a girl with a magic hand that can lead her through any maze, a boy with the size and strength of John Henry, and their leader, a boy with a special connection to the earth—must do what their more experienced parents and mentors couldn’t do. Filled with steamboat pirates, medicine shows, swamp sirens, and mechanical monsters, The Nine Pound Hammer is a steam-driven American fantasy with one foot in myth and the other in adventure.