The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter

I feel like this is maybe more of a 3 1/2 star (where are those 1/2 stars Goodreads?). I also feel on the fence about how to review it. The premise sounds like the start of an interesting joke, but it actually had me intrigued and in the beginning it felt brilliant. Part novel of manners, part gothic mystery, part fantasy sci-fi with characters hailing from the best of the classics...Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein, Moreau, Sherlock and Watson, but with a feminist twist having many of the classic characters ‘daughters' take centre stage. For the first half of the book I was really enjoying it, even if I found the side commentary a bit distracting at times. I was interested in the mystery and the coming together of the characters and building up to a showdown. But then it gets really over long and seems to have a climax in the middle and then spends the rest of the book having the characters explain their part in the whole ‘mystery', which frankly gets a bit boring after awhile. Show, don't tell goes right out the window. I'm glad I did the audio book, because I may have given up. It looses all momentum and becomes a tedious recounting of past events and I lost whatever care I had for the characters as they are reduced to storytellers without personalities. I really wanted to love this. There is a great, interesting and unique story in there, but the odd decision to have the characters interrupt the story with dialogue and letting the second half of the book devolve into a lacklustre ‘and this is what happened to me' recounting AFTER the climax just had it feel flat at the end. I don't think it is a terrible book and I really enjoyed the first half, so it does have some merit, but the second half just fizzled what joy I had going in and left me feeling a bit disappointed. I think the audio book helps if you can listen to it, as the narrator manages to inflect some more life into the characters and that helped me get through to the end.