Rating: WARTY!
I read all four of this series and liked only the first two. I thought I was going to like this one until it became such a clichéd bore of a werewolf romance story that it made me want to vomit. I have no time for bullshit werewolf or vampire romances. This one promised not to be such a novel when it began. It was steampunk. Why authors feel the need to include vampires and werewolves in their steampunk tales is a complete and utter mystery to me, because it never works. The story always wants to be one or the other and is ruined by trying to make it both.
Sophronia is at a girls' finishing school based on an airship, but it's really a finishing school for female spies. That part was all well and good, but of course the author had to throw in a forbidden romance because no YA female main character is complete unless she has a demanding and pushy bad boy after her.
The guy's absurd name was Soap and he was a grease monkey on the airship - so, forbidden. Then the author evidently thought she had to up the ante, and she had Sophronia save Soap's life by begging the werewolves to bite him. Now Soap is a werewolf and even more forbidden, and far from being pissed at her for interfering in his life (or death), he now sees her action as a declaration of her love for him, and bizarrely thinks he owns her. Never once does Sophronia set limits or boundaries, because he pulls all sorts of entirely inappropriate behaviors on her and she gulps it down like a bitch in heat.
In short, the whole thing reeked. The author might have rescued it if she'd had anything going on other than the romance, but there was literally nothing happening that was worth the telling in the fifty percent of this that I could stand to read, and the romance was all this book had to offer. That was certainly not worth the telling. It's been done countless times before. Please, bring me an author with an imagination and some originality. I'm done with this one. I ditched it and moved on to something hopefully better, and which I felt certain couldn't possibly be any worse.
