It is a machine of cogs and weights, but the spirit within is Neva and her gift for listening to the songs the weather sings. The ‘Weather Woman’ of the title is an automaton created by Neva’s adoptive clockmaker father to enable her, as an adult, to publicly yet secretly predict the weather.

A fraudulent automaton, it takes on challengers who confidently gamble that they can’t lose. Neva, a three-year-old child of Russian fair folk, listens to the song of the ice beneath everyone’s feet, while her mother, an unbeatable chess player, is sewn into the belly of a chess-playing bear. The novel opens with the frost fair of January 1789, when the Thames froze at London Bridge, around which sprawled booths and tents exhibiting wild animals and street entertainers. But they were often a fraud, powered by a real person secreted within the bodywork. These were machines into which technology had breathed the suggestion of life, fascinating spectators with displays of inanimate logic. Sally Gardner’s The Weather Woman (Head of Zeus, 2022) buys us a ticket into the popular culture of the 18th century, where science and entertainment came together in an interest in automata.

Natural Magic: Songs of Rain and Breaking Ice in The Weather Woman

The Sweetest Rain by Myra Johnson