Author:

Lesson: The games of royals can get rather tedious.

I was lent this book after mentioning that I wanted to check out the sequel¹ and it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I thought it would be steam punk, but instead it’s a bit of a split between a Victorian aristocracy and a strange, metallic fantasy prison, each world containing a different main character and the two main characters slowly working their way to one another.

Except I was only drawn in by about half the book. Finn, the prisoner in this strange fantastical land with no memory of his previous life where he was probably a prince, now trying to survive and escape his situation, was interesting and I wanted to see him succeed. Claudia, the young woman who was being forced to marry the delinquent prince and looking at things as a power struggle and “Playing the game” of the aristocracy just seemed tedious.

Honestly, I didn’t care at all about her struggle. She didn’t want to marry this prince, she wanted the real one, which she found in the prison. She didn’t seem to even care about the real prince outside of him being the real one. She was doing it because… I’m not even sure. Because he’d be nicer than the other guy, I suppose. It certainly wasn’t out of love, instead out of some desire to screw up people’s plans for her. Sure, she says that she cared for him, but there was little to none of that showing.

Her side of the story is important, granted. It just wasn’t as entertaining as the stuff with Finn. She was bred to be stoic and cold so that she could handle court life, but it distanced her as a character and the court stuff is all political intrigue, which isn’t terribly exciting to me when there’s a whole fictional world where metal starts to replace organic material when they run out.