The Clockwork Scarab Book Review

Title: The Clockwork Scarab
Series: Stoker and Holmes (Book #1)
Author: Colleen Gleason
Genre: Historical, fantasy
Rating: 7 ~Oh Hey, A Young Adult Book That Passes The Bechdel Test With Flying Colors~ out of 10
What's It's About: Mina is the niece of Sherlock Holmes and Evaline is the sister of Bram Stoker. The girls are trying to solve a case of missing (and a few dead) society girls, which seems to be tied up with Egyptian mythology.
Recommended For: Fans of steampunk (I swear the word "steam" is used like 50 times in this book), and the original Sherlock stories
Review: I'm going to start with the things that I didn't like. Evaline was very annoyed for the entire book. She was bratty and whiny and she complained about EVERYTHING. She reminded me of Caroline from The Vampire Diaries (that's not a good thing). I found myself wanting to skip her chapters and get to the chapters of Mina, who was far superior. I didn't like the inclusion of time travel. I feel like it made an already full story way too cramped. I think that the story would have worked just fine without it. I also was not a big fan of the writing at times. It felt like this was written very fast and it makes it come off as something written by a young or inexperienced writer. I normally don't pick apart someone's writing craft because I like to focus on the plot and characters, but there were a lot of times where the writing didn't flow right for me. But I did like the mystery plot. Trying to figure out what was going on with the missing girls, who was the head of the conspiracy, was a lot of fun. I like that even though the girls have romantic interests, their main focus remains solving the case and keeping each other alive. I like that the relationship between Mina and Evaline evolves from being completely annoyed by each other to becoming almost friends. The girls each had their own voice and I never forgot who I was reading about, which is a problem that a lot of authors have trouble doing properly. Whenever I see a book has multiple first person points-of-view, I'm a little wary because the book can either go the Legend route and be done well or it can be Allegiant, which is... not very good. But The Clockwork Scarab did it perfectly. The sequel, The Spiritglass Charade, is already out and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it!
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