She was good at making friends.

Coppelia is a street thief, a trickster, a low-level con artist. But she has something other thieves don’t… tiny puppet-like friends: some made of wood, some of metal. They don’t entirely trust her, and she doesn’t entirely understand them, but their partnership mostly works.

After a surprising discovery shakes their world to the core, Coppelia and her friends must re-examine everything they thought they knew about their world, while attempting to save their city from a seemingly impossible new threat.

While Tchaikovsky’s phenomenal productivity does mean that we seem to have three new books every year, some of the recent surge in output is down to books previously released in the states acquiring a UK publisher, such as Spiderlight (which I reviewed for the Hive here) and Made Things. While these are technically reviews of ARCs, both books already have thousands of Goodreads ratings and – being written almost a decade ago – hail from a very different contemporary zeitgeist. Nonetheless, Made Things is an entertaining novella shot through with Tchaikovskian eye-catching writing and sharp observations.  For example, this description of a zealous Watch officer.

He was religious in that particular way that meant he took sanctimonious pride in the whippings he doled out for petty offences, such as being poor and not running away fast enough.

Like Lyra in The Northern Lights (aka The Golden Compass) Coppelia makes an engagingly rebellious protagonist with a diminutive and occasionally argumentative side-kick (well two of them actually). The other comparator would be Mary Norton’s The Borrowers for the ‘puppet-like’ companions are part of a subversive community of tiny beings hovering in the liminal spaces of human society (well behind the skirting boards and in the attics). These beings are the eponymous ‘made things’ or homunculi in the best tradition of D&D as familiars created (not adopted) through wizardly magic.

Coppelia and her miniature associates are not quite allied behind a common purpose like – say the Fellowship of the ring – so much as travelling companions whose interests and direction align for the present moment. Tchaikovsky poses the question – will that change when danger comes for Coppelia? Can her puppet-like friends rise in her defence?

Tchaikovsky’s creatures are ‘made’ from a variety of inorganic materials – more in the manner of golems than traditional squishy D&D homunculi. Being based of wood, metal, paper, wax or anything else that can be shaped into humanoid form, creates an interesting variety of characters and of insults and rivalries that can be traded between the different types. For example, when one bone-crafted homunculus rounds on Coppelia’s two most firm (meta and wood-based) supporters in their colony.

Effl cackled shrilly, mouse-skull head turned to goggle at him. “I heard your words of what the humans said. Rust-head, knot-hole, what fools you are!”

The colony’s leader is a origami creature, folded from the torn pages of some wizardly tome. These material differences feed into not just the obvious vulnerabilities, but the character and descriptions of each homunculus.

“They saw you.” Shallis’s dry crisp voice out of Shallis’s dry crisp mouth.

Shallis rustled, a living document impatient with circumlocution.

The tiny colony (less than a couple of handfuls) of homunculi has come to Coppelia’s home city of Loretz having left the wizard’s tower where an enduring accident of magic has birthed a whole population of little creatures. Not all remained there, for – in the best(?!) traditions of colonialism…

The rich lineages had stayed where their power was, in the Tower. The colonies were for the adventurous poor with nothing to lose.

In Tchaikovsky’s inventive hands magic in this world has become a commodity. The wealthy inherit it, accrue it, hoard it – the disadvantaged and impoverished covet it.

It’s not skill that makes them mage-lords. It’s a fat inheritance, is all.

The aura bleeding out of magic artefacts and people is not just a precious commodity but it is – for the homunculi – the gift of life and the means of reproduction. They will fashion their own offspring in a humanoid shape out of raw materials and bring the inert form within range of the magic radiated from a suitably strong source to bring it to life.

The engine of the story is a heist that Coppelia is drawn into. When the local lead hoodlum (going by the unlikely moniker of The Iron End) hears of a wondrous magical item in a cellar within the inner city of the rich, he deputises a gang of his own henchmen and a couple of less willing conscripts – including Coppelia – to go and retrieve it.  The plan starts well enough

They assembled before dawn outside the Bag of Teeth, a tavern as unsavoury as it sounded.

Not so much Ocean’s Eleven as The Iron End’s Half Dozen, with colourful names to match their characters, Shabby Lilith Yarney, Hamfingers Rosso, Auntie, Doublet, Doctor “Sweaty” Losef, and last but not least Poppet (aka Coppelia).

Of course things don’t go exactly according to plan…

Despite the novella length of the book, it is rich in memorable lines, insights and turns of phrase. For example when Coppelia is trying to grovel her way out of trouble before the city’s most powerful leader.

The workshops of her mind were minting sincerity in unprecedent quantities, depressing the market for years to come with their adulterated coinage… And with just enough starry-eyed awe, the gutter urchin confronted the magnificence of Loretz’s master mage, because if the mighty craved one thing, it was validation, knowing in their heart of hearts that there were never so grand as they styled themselves, even when they were made of gold and gems.

Gold encrusted mighty craving validation? – can’t think who that makes me think of!

I also particularly enjoyed the razor wielding metal-made homunculus Arc as he ponders parenthood. The nature of homunculi reproduction is that successive generations of parent and child alternate between male and female genders. Having retrieved a suitable ‘object’ in a humanoid shaped dancer statuette Arc is all up for expanding the colony’s tiny population.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Arc put an arm about the figure companionably. “Eh? Why not, then? We need the bodies, don’t we?”

“He,” Coppelia corrected absently. “And—”

“She. If I finish her and give her life, then she,” Arc pointed out, as though she were stupid. The dancer was definitely crafted as a very well-endowed man, but that obviously wasn’t the point.

Alongside the sharp social commentary, inventive world building and fluid prose, Tchaikovsky delivers a delightful cast of fascinating people of all sizes, proving that characters – like their stories – do not need to be huge to be compelling and entertaining.

Made Things is due for release 4th December – you can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org