Rating:
Genre: YA Fantasy
Recommended Age: 15+ (violence, death, confusion, historical inaccuracies, plot holes, and weak writing).
Pages: 336
I received a free copy of this book via NetGalley. Thanks! All opinions are my own.
Synopsis:
A certain pen, a certain book, and a certain person can craft entirely new worlds through a branch of science called scriptology. Elsa comes from one such world that was written into creation, where her mother―a noted scriptologist―constantly alters and expands their reality.
But when her home is attacked and her mother kidnapped, Elsa is forced to cross into the real world and use her own scriptology gifts to find her. In an alternative Victorian Italy, Elsa finds a secret society of young scientists with a gift for mechanics, alchemy, or scriptology―and meets Leo, a gorgeous mechanist with a smart mouth and tragic past. She recruits the help of these fellow geniuses just as an assassin arrives on their doorstep.
In this thrilling debut, worlds collide as Elsa unveils a deep political conspiracy seeking to unlock the most dangerous weapon ever created―and only she can stop it.
I am really disappointed in this book. I like steampunk and I liked what I heard about this book, so I was really hyped to read it. But avast, it was not so. The story is great and the use of the Oxford comma in the title was a plus for me. But sadly, that’s where the fun times end.
This book is really hard to get into. Not counting the fact that the e-arc had a lot of issues with how it was displayed (random chopped up words and random spaces in words) this book was really boring for me. The book was confusing from the get go and I read at least every other chapter twice because of how confused I was. There are numerous plot holes in this book and when you think about it, this world doesn’t make any sense and neither does the main characters actions. The book had little character development and the world building was missing. This book needs world building and it’s just not there. It also took a bit for me to figure out the time period this book was set in. Also, some of the book takes place in Sardinia but there’s no mention of the native, main language. The point of a steampunk novel is to have modern day inventions with a twist, but there’s none of that for a lot of the items like flamethrowers for instance. The core drive of a steampunk is to be a technophobes dream, but this book had little technology building to it (which I don’t include on every review, but for a steampunk I believe it’s important).
Verdict: It was a skip for me for several reasons, but if you’re looking for a Last Magician esque book then by all means please read this one. This book did not do it for me sadly.
*Click on the signature to go to Paige's blog!
0 comments:
Post a Comment