Grey Haward has always detested the Chemists, the magicians-come-scientists who rule her western town. But she has always followed the rules, taking the potion the Chemists ration out that helps the town’s people survive. A potion that Grey suspects she–like her grandfather and father–may not actually need.By working at her grandfather’s repair shop, sorting the small gears and dusting the … dusting the curio cabinet inside, Grey has tried to stay unnoticed–or as unnoticed as a tall, strong girl can in a town of diminutive, underdeveloped citizens. Then her best friend, Whit, is caught by the Chemists’ enforcers after trying to protect Grey one night, and after seeing the extent of his punishment, suddenly taking risks seems the only decision she can make.
But with the risk comes the reality that the Chemists know her family’s secret, and the Chemists soon decide to use her for their own purposes. Panicked, Grey retreats to the only safe place she knows–her grandfather’s shop. There, however, a larger secret confronts her when her touch unlocks the old curio cabinet in the corner and reveals a world where porcelain and clockwork people are real. There, she could find the key that may save Whit’s life and also end the Chemists’ dark rule forever.
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I’m not great at openings, so I’ll just jump straight to my thoughts on the book.
I found the worldbuilding in this book somewhat confusing and hard to get into. I feel like Curio was more thought out and planned than Mercury City, with more things explained in and about it than in Mercury City. Maybe I’m just not used to this genre, but I found the worldbuilding to be often unclear and hard to follow.
This isn’t a book I would really read again unless I’m looking for surface level satisfaction. Something I find often in YA books is a lack of deeper meaning, which I personally don’t prefer, but I was willing to try overlooking that for the story. It was interesting enough to keep me reading, and I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but the overall effect of the book wasn’t enough to have me coming back to it, and there were a few negative elements (especially toward the end) that made me uncomfortable, sometimes extremely so.
~Spoiler Warning~
There were many times that Lord Blueboy showed obvious fascination for Grey, which I tried to reason would be so. After all, they believed her to be a soft, unbreakable Porcie. But then things escalated a little more, and reached a point where, had he been human, the scene would have been an attempted rape. It held many of the dark feelings of a rape scene, and especially being a teen/YA book, this made me very uncomfortable.
In a later scene, Grey is tied to a bed in Lord Blueboy’s chambers. He comes in, straddles, and kisses her, before moving to his real topic: how she stays so strong and unbreakable. She tells him it’s because of blood. Now, I was very uncomfortable just at the above-mentioned aspects, but then he took it even farther. Looking to a cut Grey had on her wrist, he sees the blood, AND BEGINS TO DRINK IT! This makes a little more sense given that he drinks water out of the Tocks’ wrists all the time (something that, yet again, struck me as odd and made me uncomfortable), but the whole scene had such a dark feeling to me. This is not something I would want most of my friends or nieces and nephews to ever read.
Then, to top it off, and a scene that still causes me physical discomfort, a procession of events unfold, and Grey’s hand ends up getting cut off (yes, by Blueboy), exposing bone and blood. The whole scene was too easy to picture, and I still inwardly revolt at the thought of it.
So yes, the book had surface level entertainment value, and maybe these scenes wouldn’t have effected a less sensitive reader as they did me, but I found the negative content outweighing any pleasure I could feel from the book. There were many more negative aspects of this book, and many things that made me uncomfortable, but I can’t list them all without creating a VERY lengthy review.
I don’t usually review books (in fact, I think this is my first time), but I thought it fair to warn other readers out there who might be like me, and to spare them the trouble of reading something that would make them as uncomfortable as it did me.