The Girl in the Steel Corset

Review ebook The Girl in the Steel Corset

OhthankyouGodJesusit’sfinallyover!!!! Phew! Reading this book was a constant battle against narcolepsy.

The Girl in the Steel Corset pretty much embodies everything that is wrong with YA today. It’s all about the packaging, and nothing to do with substance. This book had one of the most attention-grabbing titles I have seen this year; the cover moves beyond pretty into a new realm of gorgeous (notice the little clockwork design on the wallpaper? so awesome!); and it has a very enticing blurb OhthankyouGodJesusit’sfinallyover!!!! Phew! Reading this book was a constant battle against narcolepsy.

The Girl in the Steel Corset pretty much embodies everything that is wrong with YA today. It’s all about the packaging, and nothing to do with substance. This book had one of the most attention-grabbing titles I have seen this year; the cover moves beyond pretty into a new realm of gorgeous (notice the little clockwork design on the wallpaper? so awesome!); and it has a very enticing blurb/synopsis that gives no hint of the load of meh waiting inside.

So this is supposed to be a steampunk novel. This is supposed to be a steampunk novel for young adults. This is supposed to be a steampunk novel for young adults revolving around murder, conspiracies and mechanical mayhem.

Yeah, I’m still waiting on that order…

So there’s an ill-treated serving girl who runs away from this rich aristocrat who tries to molest her. She runs straight into the arms of a richer, handsome, personable and kind-hearted duke. Said duke thinks she’s gorgeous, but she has some ‘issues’ he needs to help her overcome before they can be together. One of the obstacles to the path of true love is some evil guy planning to take over the world, but more importantly, well… there’s this other guy…

This book frustrates me because it had so much potential! It could have been YA’s heaven-sent answer to Clockwork Angel. But no. Instead, it’s just a historical romance with a bit of mechanical robots thrown in. And a very childish mystery that even my toddler would have rejected. And a completely pointless and unnecessary love triangle. And a sacrilegious dumbing-down of one of the coolest horror stories ever- yes, ladies and gentlemen, our heroine is the DAUGHTER of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde. And she’s boring!!!

This gif has more personality than Finley Jayne

This book is riddled with inconsistencies. For example, Finley dresses in short pants, she spends the night unchaperoned at a single man’s house, she learns kung-fu with some shirtless guy, yet when the hero wants to show her his tattoo, she wants to remind him that it’s ‘improper’ to unbutton his shirt in front of a lady! O-kay, then.

The love triangle is ridiculous and ridiculously clichéd. There’s the virtuous and boring hero, the interesting-but-strangely-accommodative crime lord who’s secretly supah-sensitive despite his bad boy image. Finley, of course, is torn between these two cardboard cutouts and cannot for the life of her choose between these two handsome, dashing men who are so far out of her league that she ought not to be entertaining any fantasies about them anyway. Bad boy Jack Dandy is apparently a well-educated plummy type who affects a Cockney accent for some unfathomable reason. He plays NO role in the book except as the additional love interest, an angle that this already-terrible book could have done without.

I don’t generally rave about the show-don’t-tell rule, because I like descriptive writing, as long as it is done well. ‘Done well’ being the operative phrase here. This book just tells and tells and tells without ever getting interesting. The secondary characters are weirdly flat, except for best-friend Sam, who is just TSTL. It’s not often that I see a male TSTL character, so kudos to the author for not being restrained by gender biases!

As mentioned before the mystery/thriller aspect of the story is handled clumsily. It’s as if the author wanted to focus on the romance, but forced herself to shove some mystery into the plot so that the book wouldn’t get shelved in the romance section.

I guess the steampunk aspect of this novel wasn’t completely hideous. Just a little too convenient. There were too many modern devices that made an appearance, only instead of being battery-powered they were steam-powered. I liked the concept of the Organites, a sort of mysterious organism that is speculated as being the source of life, but they were just sort of introduced and never explained properly. Neither was the magic, or the group’s strange abilities, or even Finley’s integration of her light and dark sides. Basically, every interesting thing in this book was left dangling while we pursued the boring hero and heroine through their boring lives.

I really had to force myself to finish this book, because I feel a sort of moral obligation not to abandon ARCs. If I had bought this book, believe you me, I would have abandoned it a hundred pages in, and never looked back. The writing is a weird mixture of too modern, forcedly Victorian and strangely idiomatic. It doesn’t gel well at all! My recommendation? Don’t bother!

Disclosure: This book was provided to me by the publishers via Net Galley. No external considerations affected this review.
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