This is coming from a cis white male, so anything I say on this topic should be taken with a grain of salt, but I enjoyed the main character. I kind of predicted a few of the twists, thanks I’ll say to foreshadowing much earlier in the book, but some of them were new.

Steampunk or gaslamp fantasy (I think the supernatural elements of the book make it count as Gaslamp?But before he expired, Dreadnought passed his mantle to her, and those second hand superpowers transformed Danny's body into what she's always thought it should be. Inheriting the Dreadnought mantle pretty much guarantees Danny a spot at the cape table—when she turns eighteen. Not only that, but she also has to deal with frequent misgendering by a trans-exclusionary feminist. The insights that led to the conception and construction of the title Dreadnought are explained and the reader is informed that this was not the first HMS " Dreadnought" as there had been ships named "Dreadnought" all the way back to Elizabeth I.

The worldbuilding feels familiar in a sense, in that it's sort of 'standard superhero' fare, but that worked just fine for me.This is a page-turning adventure that also explores identity and acceptance in a poignant, lovely way. First of all, it was obvious that it was a debut, the writing felt young and awkward, the characters are as flat as can be and the story was very predictable. A superhero novel is gonna need action scenes to work and oh my god, do Dreadnought‘s action scenes work. I'll not claim expertise on how things work from where you're from, but in my experience of the world, that is a poor choice of behavior.