Review of The Girl in the Steel Corset by Kady Cross

Title: The Girl in the Steel Corset

Author: Kady Cross

Published by: Harlequin TEEN

Released: 2011

Summary: Finley Jayne is just trying to survive, but she has a problem of keeping employed. Not only are the sons of dukes and lords complete cads, they also make Finley angry, and when Finley is angry her dark side is unleashed. After beating up Felix August-Raynes, Finley goes on the run and unintentionally crosses paths with Griffin King. Griffin is intrigued by Finley and offers her a place to stay and help for her problems. Finley accepts and becomes part of a group of enhanced kids. Emily, a mechanical genius, Sam enhanced and super strong, and Jasper the quickest cowboy around (admittedly, cowboys are a rare find in England). Finley teams up with these super kids to stop a villain named The Machinist, who uses automatons for evil. Finley and her friends must take down The Machinist and save the Queen before it's too late.

My Thoughts: This was my first foray into the genre known as Steampunk, and I really enjoyed the ride and plan on reading more of it. My favorite part of The Girl in the Steel Corset was the world Kady Cross introduced me to. It was so vivid and real with an exciting twist. I loved the mixture of Victorian 1800 society with robots and technology. Just very cool to read. The Steampunk world has become one of my favorites.

I enjoyed Cross's band of misfit characters as a whole. Individually, some of them gave me some problems, but as a group they were pretty awesome. My two favorites would have to be Emily and Jasper. They were the two most solid of the bunch, but sometimes Cross played into overused stereotypes. I also really liked Jack Dandy and wished for more of his story. The characters of Finley and Sam kind of annoyed me. I wished Finley would have merged the two sides of herself sooner so she could have been one cool character throughout the book instead of a character who was cool sometimes and boring the other times. Sam annoyed me because I was misled from the synopsis of him being part robot (he wasn't) and he was acting like a baby through the majority of the book.

The story of the book was pretty good. It started off with a bang and the ending scenes were very good. It was a little easy to figure out who the villain was though.

All in all, I really enjoyed this book. The steampunk world was awesome to read about and the cast of character's as a whole were impressive. I will definitely be reading more steampunk in the near future.

BOOKCITEMENT LEVEL 4/5

Robots in Victorian England... Cool!