The Strange Case of Finley Jayne by Kady Cross

Summary (via goodreads): "Finley Jayne knows she's not 'normal'. Normal girls don't lose time, or have something inside them that makes them capable of remarkably violent things. Her behavior has already cost her one job, so when she's offered the lofty position of companion to Phoebe, a debutante recently engaged to Lord Vincent, she accepts, despite having no experience. Lord Vincent is a man of science with his automatons and inventions, but Finley is suspicious of his motives where Phoebe is concerned. She will do anything to protect her new friend, but what she discovers is even more monstrous than anything she could have imagined…"

Review: Ok, novella. So not much of a plot, not much of character development, and not much of anything, really. Because it's a novella. So here's what it had:

-World-building. The characters went to a couple parties, they went out shopping, and they went out to socialize and be seen a little bit. And everywhere they went, the steampunk world was described and lived in, to give me as a first-time reader of this series (the first book is out already, yes?) a feel for what it's like to live there. It was a huge priority, thrown in at every possible moment, yet it wasn't pushy or clunky; it was just world-building, in a big way.

-Finley. So I looked at this novella as kind of an advertisement for the rest of the series (why else would you give away a prequel novella as a free ebook?), and because it doesn't seem to me like Phoebe or Lady Morton are in the next book (but I could easily be wrong), I as a reader really needed to like Finley. So she (obviously) took center stage. I liked her well enough; she seems sensible, and also willing to admit when she's wrong, while at the same time slightly schizophrenic. (I was SO glad that even though there was that whole "weaker side being asleep thing," that she still remembered her excursion in the middle of the night. Memory loss would have made that WAY too Jekyll and Hyde for me.)

I may or may not read the real books in this series; we'll see if they cross my path or not.

Goodreads Shelves: addictive, bechdel-test, fluffy, my-kind-of-woman, nook-ya

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