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Tahlia Newland

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Review: The Girl in the Clockwork Collar by Kady Cross

June 15, 2012 by Tahlia Newland

Title: The Girl in the Clockwork Collar
SubTitle: Book 2 in the The Steampunk Chronicles series 
Author:
Kady Cross
Publisher: HarlequinTEEN
Pub Date:
May 29, 2012
Category: Young adult steampunk

The Girl in the Steel Corset was an excellent novel and this, the sequel is quite possibly even better. It certainly has all the wonderful characters and great action of the first and it’s not too heavy, depressing and relentless like a lot of the young adult books coming out these days. Thank you, Harlequin Teen.

The Girl in the Clockwork Collar is set in an alternate version of Queen Victoria’s era where steam power and mechanics became the pervading technology, not electricity. Steampunk is the name of this genre which could also be thought of as science fiction as people in the Victorian era might have imagined it.

The beauty of this genre for modern readers is that it brings together the best of that era without the worst of it. Women wear Victorian era clothes with the addition of trousers added to their wardrobe, so we get corsets and fabulous dresses but aren’t limited to them. The female characters in Steampunk are also as gutsy and intelligent as their modern counterparts, though, as in this one, there’s usually a frivolous Victorian woman somewhere in the story.

The men have the wonderful manners and elegant speech patterns of the era but without the derogatory opinions of woman that were rife in that age in our history. So it’s a win win situation. In Cady Cross’s Steampunk Cronicles we Griffin King an English duke with enormous power due to his ability to use the ether,  Finley Jayne, a rough & tumble girl who tries not to be in love with him because she isn’t of Griffin’s class, Emily is an engineering genius and her beloved Sam is just a very large, very strong boy with some mechanical body parts.

Then there’s Jasper, the American cowboy, who at the end of the last book got taken back to the US to face murder allegations. In this book, we discover that the men who took him away weren’t US marshals as they said, they were members of Jasper’s old gang, a very nasty bunch who want him to return a machine he stole for them before he left for England.

The reason he hit it –in pieces –was because he figured it was something dangerous and he didn’t want it getting into the boss’s hands. However, the gang has his old girlfriend and if he doesn’t do what they ask, she will die.

Griffin and his motley crew of teens with supernatural abilities can’t believe that Jasper would murder anyone, so they follow him to  New York City in 1897, discover what’s going on and must rescue Jasper and stop the gang boss before he  kills Jasper and uses the device for whatever evil purpose its intended.

From the blurb
Now, to help those she’s come to care for so deeply, Finley Jayne must infiltrate a criminal gang. Only problem is, she might like the dark side a little too much….

It’s a top quality book, that I can’t imagine any young adult reader not liking. I give it 5 stars and highly recommend it.

Buy on Kindle: The Girl in the Clockwork Collar (The Steampunk Chronicles)

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Filed Under: 5 stars, Reviews, Steampunk, YA fantasy Tagged With: 5 stars, Book Review, Fantasy novels review blogs, Steampunk, The Girl in the Clockwork Collar by Kady Cross, young adult

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Comments

  1. Maria Tatham says

    June 15, 2012 at 10:22 am

    Tahlia, this was entertaining – plus, thanks for educating me about what steampunk is. I’ve heard it mentioned a lot but haven’t know what-in-the-world it is.

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