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Book two in Kady Cross' Steampunk Chronicles picks up shortly after book one left off, continuing the whirlwind adventures of Finley Jayne, Griffin King, and their friends. Though it's just as full of adventure, evil foes, and strange contraptions as the first book, The Girl in the Clockwork Collar didn't feel quite as fun as The Girl in the Steel Corset. It may, perhaps, suffer from "middle book syndrome."

Publication Information

• Full Title:The Girl in the Clockwork Collar
• Series: The Steampunk Chronicles (#2)
• Author: Kady Cross
• Publisher: Harlequin Teen
• Publication Date: 2012
• ISBN: 978-0-373-21053-4 (hardcover), 978-0-373-21082-4 (paperback), 978-1-459-23011-8 (e-book), B007JJSMPK (Kindle AISN)

The Continuing Adventures of Finley Jayne

When The Girl in the Steel Corset ended, one of the groups of friends -- Jasper -- had been taken from London to New York to stand trial for murder. It is a murder his friends don't believe he committed, so Finley, Griffin, Emily, and Sam follow after their American friend to see if they can help clear his name.

Meanwhile, Jasper finds he is not in the hands of the law after all, but has instead fallen into the clutches of his old gang leader Reno Dalton. Dalton has brought Jasper's old love Mei from San Francisco and put a clockwork collar around her neck. If Jasper doesn't return a device he stole, then Dalton will set the collar in motion, and Mei will be strangled.

Derring-Do

Although The Girl in the Clockwork Collar opens with a fun and dangerous scene on the open outer deck of an airship (a steampunk staple because airships are cool), that event can't quite compete with the opening scene of The Girl in the Steel Corset -- though to be fair, that was one of the best opening scenes I've ever read in any book, so it would be hard to equal. The rest of the book seems to follow the same pattern. It's really good, but it lacks some of the excitement of the first book.

Maybe there isn't as much action, or maybe it's simply that the ideas aren't as fresh. Or maybe an attentive editor took out too much of the enthusiasm of the writing (this is always a danger when trying to make any writing better -- you can all-too-easily edit the life out of it).

Such a Character

On the other hand, even if this book isn't as gripping as the first was, it still has the same cast of very fun characters. Finley has had the Jekyll-and-Hyde halves of her personality united, but she's still not sure who she is, or even who she wants to be. She craves excitement, even violence, but does that mean she would prefer a life of crime?

The attention is, naturally, mostly on Finley, as the series is her story. And Jasper, as the focus of the friends' voyage, gets plenty of attention, too. Unfortunately, though, this means we don't get to spend as much time with Griffin, Sam, or Emily, and sometimes they (especially poor Sam) feel more like incidental characters than core parts of the group.

And there are some new characters, too. Of course there's a new villain (plus his minions), and an opponent who might actually be an ally. And the crazy-but-brilliant real-life inventor Nikola Tesla makes several appearances. The characters are all wonderful, but even in a book as long as this one (about 400 pages in hardcover) there just isn't the room to delve into them as as I would have liked.

Pretty Good, For a Middle Book

The feeling I got with the characters -- that they were often passed over too quickly -- also extended to other elements. There were some great settings (like the Museum) that I would have loved to have explored in more depth, for example. And some events just sort of happened, but didn't tie back into the rest of the story. I'm pretty sure they're set-up for the next book, so someone reading all three one after the other would probably be less affected by the fact that they're not explored here.

I don't want to make it sound like The Girl in the Clockwork Collar is a book you should pass over, though. If you read the first one and liked it, then you'll like this one, too. It's not really a worse book, it just lacks something unnamable that the first book had. I fully expect, though, that when I read book three (coming up very soon in my review queue), all of my criticisms of book 2 will evaporate.



Disclosure: A review copy was purchased by the reviewer because she loved the first book so much. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.