The girl in the steel corset by Kady Cross

When Finley Jayne defends herself from the unwanted advances of her employer she runs into the night knowing that her employment is at an end - but she has no idea that her life is about to change beyond comprehension.  After she is run down by Griffin King, the Duke of Greythorne, she finds herself taken into his home and into his inner circle of friends - where each friend has an extraordinary skill that makes them unique.  Griffin can access the Aether, Emily has an amazing touch with machines and healing, Sam is a hulking great brute with unbelieavble strength and a gentle heart, and their American friend Jasper has some secrets of his own.  It is a strange world Finley has entered, and she is not the only one struggling to make sense of what is happening because there is someone working against Griffin and his friends - and he won't stop until he gets what he wants.

The concept for the Girl in the steel corset was amazing, a kind of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen for a new era with teenagers as the heroes - sadly though the book itself was just so blah.  I finished it, but only because I was skim reading through the pages as quickly as possible to find out what happened, but not reading all the bone numbingly boring details.  The novel is set in a steampunk world, I get it, I didn't need to have every single outfit worn by Finley described in minute boring detail, or for so much time to be sent describing things - saying they disabled the bike works so much better than having several sentences describing how they went about disabling the bikes.  The only redeeming feature of the novel for me was the relationships between the main characters and the depth to the main characters, but even then some of the relationships and reactions were so two dimensional and clumsily written that it almost made me shudder.

I have to confess that as an adult reading this I may be missing some of the subtleties that make this series appeal to teenagers, but it lacks so much that I genuinely feel it will be a disappointment to other readers who are expecting an intelligent read set in a sophisticated world.  Despite the authors best intentions this just fell flat and was a rushed read to reach the slightly less than satisfying conclusion.  There are other books to the series so it may be that the satisfaction comes from reading more of the series, but I am not 100% hopeful of this fact.

If you like this book then try:

• The girl in the clockwork collar by Kady Cross
• Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
• Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
• City of bones by Cassandra Clare
• Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
• The clockwork angel by Cassandra Clare
• Mortal engines by Philip Reeve
• Airborn by Kenneth Oppel
• The Hunchback assignments by Arthur Slade
• Incarceron by Catherine Fisher
• Worldshaker by Richard Harland

 

Reviewed by Brilla