Curio » Review

Those who follow my reviews know that I have a weird relationship with steampunk.  I never seem to like books featuring mechanical fantasy, and yet, I keep trying, striving, to find gems in this troublesome genre.  Over and over again, I start a steampunk book and wind up with a DNF — Did Not Finish. I had some high hopes for Curio — pretty cover, ooooh — but I should have known better.  This book might be the one to make me give up on steampunk forever.

Curio has a very complex — okay, complicated — premise.  We have an alternate version of the United States, magician-scientists, potions that allow people to digest food, a town with strict rules enforced by whippings, a cabinet leading to a world of living machines called "porcies"...  It was all too much for me to take in.  My imagination wouldn't stretch that far. My common sense kept interrupting, piping up, but that doesn't make any sense!

Complicating matters was the pace of the book.  Curio starts out with an exciting scene of two teens racing to make it home before curfew.  We don't know what will happen if they fail, just that the consequences will be very bad. After that initial scene, however, the pace staggers at an alarming rate. The prose gets slogged down by tedious description.  We're told about every color that crosses our protagonist's eyes, every thought, every sensation... There needed to be editing to remove all of the unnecessary language — badly.  

All of this may have been tolerable, though, if not for the blandness of our protagonist, Grey.  She was a husk.  Early on in the book, she acts in a way that was clearly supposed to make readers admire her, but I was left cold.  Her actions weren't that impressive. We're told ad nauseam by other characters that Grey is special, but we were not shown that in any interesting or unique way.

Earlier on, I was going to recommend Curio for fans of Incarceron and Sapphique, two popular books in the YA steampunk niche, but now I hesitate to recommend this book in any capacity.  To put it frankly, I was not intrigued, not delighted, not interested.  I was frustrated and bored.