Author: Kady Cross
Published: May 2011
Publisher: HarlequinTeen
Series: Steampunk Chronicles #1
473 pages (hardcover)
First, can I just say how beautiful the cover of this book is? Seriously drop dead gorgeous! Kudos to whoever designed it, he/she did an amazing job.
Can’t really say the actual book stunned me as well as the cover though. Oh, it was an alright, but it really lacked the oomph to make me like it. I almost like it, if that is possible. I want to like it! But I’m teetering on the edge.
The Girl In The Steel Corset takes place in a steampunk’d Victorian era. Finley Jayne, superhuman, female-Jekyll-and-Hyde and then-servant, escapes her abusive master’s home only to get nearly run over by a duke, Griffin King. Griffin rescues her and brings him to her house, where his friends live with him. Griffin and his friends aren’t normal people though. Like Finley, they each have some sort of special ability.
Finley reluctantly gets caught up in Griffin’s hunt for the elusive criminal, The Machinist, who has been powering automatons into attacking humans lately. Along the way she discovers a connection between her own past and Griffin’s, one that ties them to The Machinist.
Soooo … plot sounds fantastic on paper, but the execution was a bit disappointing. The mystery as to who The Machinist is was ridiculously easy to solve. I put two-and-two together very, very early on in the story, so the excitement of that plot point was watered down for me.
Kady Cross really had some great ideas — fantastic ideas! — but it felt like she tried to put too much into one book, and not all of it connected properly. It was really cool to have an X-men-esque group of characters, a sci-fi ore that’s also organic, and it was really cool to have a Jekyll-and-Hyde character; it was cool to have automatons going haywire and even cooler, to have it all in a steampunk setting (I am in love with steampunk, just FYI). But unfortunately, it felt like she had too many ideas and threw them all together too quickly. Very cool ideas and major potential … I just wish it worked out better. And then there was the ending, which was rather anti-climactic considering how quickly they took the villain down.
The characters were really boring, and seemed to carry one personality trait each. Though Finley was on the bland side, she did have some cool aspects to her. Besides her Jekyll-and-Hyde moments, she also knows how to kick some serious butt, and I always appreciate a headstrong heroine — but I do wish she had more depth to her.
Some of the characters had accents which were sometimes there and sometimes not. Emily, for example, is supposed to be Irish, and sometimes her dialogue is written with the accent incorporated, complete with words that an Irish person would say, but sometimes her dialogue was written quite “normally”. (Speaking of Emily, if I read one more description of her “ropey red hair” …)
I’m really glad the relationship between Finley and Griffin happened gradually (I can’t stand insta-love), but I’m not really sure how they came to have feelings with one another. They don’t have any chemistry between them. I didn’t like the love triangle aspect too much either — it seemed like Jack’s entire point of existence in the novel was to be the third point of said triangle. Even crazier, there was a second love triangle amongst the secondary characters (Emily, Jasper and Sam). That felt like a little too much.
I think The Girl In The Steel Corset was a very ambitious story and definitely had potential, but because there were so many great ideas being crammed into one plot, it didn’t have the desired effect. I kind of liked it, but I also kind of didn’t like it. I’m still going to keep an eye out for future books in this series though, because I do love me some steampunk, and I sincerely hope the subsequent books will be improved.
My Rating: 2.5/5
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