TITLE: The Girl in the Steel Corset
Book 1 in the new Steampunk Chronicles
AUTHOR: Kady Cross
PUBLISHED: 2011
CATEGORY: Young adult
GENRE: steampunk, historical fiction, romance, action
PREMISE: A girl with violent powers meets up with a group who has strange powers of their own in historical alternate universe England.
MY REVIEW: If you picture X-Men in a Steampunk world then this is what you come up with. I honestly have a love/hate relationship with this book. I love the world Cross has created here. It's so nice having kick-butt heroines as well as guys, there was no demeaning relationship stuff, it was a clear plot, and some stuff was enjoyable such as banter between characters.
However I cannot stand the writing style. Cross is one of those tell don't show authors. She'll have something happen and then whoever is speaking will tell us what they feel even though from the dialogue that was just spoken I can pretty much already guess it. Literally it felt like the author was holding my hand and telling me I was supposed to feel this about this situation/character and I seriously HATE when authors do that. I am not stupid I can figure out how a character feels from their actions and please let me form my own opinions about characters. It just felt so amateurish so imagine my surprise when I learned this author has apparently written like twenty adult books. It's good when she's describing things and during the action scenes but dialogue and in between parts are very awkward feeling.
Also it's predictable. Not one twist in here I was surprised by. Saw the couples forming. Saw the twist at the end the minute they talked about the Queen Victoria automaton being stolen (seriously, there's a similer plot of this in The Great Mouse Detective which is a DISNEY movie). The entire plot sans world was just unimaginative. I also didn't care for Finley much because she was a giant Mary Sue. Though I did like Emily.
This is just a book I wanted to love more then I did because it has all sorts of things I like but it was just so...cliche. Because of where it ended I will most likely look into the second one but I expect a better plot next time around. It's not bad persay, it just doesn't try very hard.
WHO SHOULD READ: those that don't mind simple plots, steampunk fans
MY RATING: Three and a half out of Five automatons
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