This book is number one on the goodreads list of steampunk books, really?


First the good. I liked the book's main conceit, the idea that vampires and werewolves are just another part of the Victorian society and how all sorts of etiquette and rules have developed to deal with that civilly. I thought the main plot was a bit hackneyed, but with potentially interesting characters and situations. I really liked the opening pages, which set a tongue in cheek tone. I imagined Alexia as a sort of Mary Poppins vampire slayer, a no-nonsense spinster, operating in Victorian England, and trying to get her job done, whilst dealing with all of the social etiquette and niceties of that time. Unfortunately, this was not exactly how the book panned out.

spoiler alert.

What I thought, up front was going to be all victorian vampire slaying turned out to be mostly cheesy bodice-ripping romance, and there was a lot more slobbery french-kissing than there was tongue in cheek comedy. When narrative tension arises the author does a brilliant job of diffusing it by telling you what a secondary character is thinking, or by dropping a storyline completely, or by whisking her heroes out of harms way as soon as she's put them in jeopardy. Characters start a chapter by sitting down for tea and giving a brief summary of the last chapter's action. There is little description and no geography, so that a story set in London might as well be anywhere. The dialogue tries for victorian wit, but often comes across clunky. The scene between Alexia and Lord Maccon repeat in variation with almost the same dialogue and the authors idea of changing this up, is to have Lord Maccon lose more clothes. But most disappointing of all is the fact that Alexia doesn't get any vampire/wolf/gollum killing action, all that gets left (in one brief scene) to Lord Maccon. In fact the vampires and villains and werewolves are all so neutered that the action never really has a chance to take off.