New York, 1882. A dark, forbidding city, and no place for a girl with unexplainable powers. Deborah Schaumberg’s gripping debut takes readers on a breathless trip across a teeming turn-of-the-century New York and asks the question: Where can you hide in a city that wants you buried? Sixteen-year-old Avery Kohl pines for the life she had before her mother was taken. She fears the mysterious men in crow masks who locked her mother in the Tombs asylum for being able to see what others couldn’t. Avery denies the signs in herself, focusing instead on her shifts at the ironworks factory and keeping her inventor father out of trouble. Other than listening to secondhand tales of adventure from her best friend, Khan, an ex-slave, and caring for her falcon, Seraphine, Avery spends her days struggling to survive. Like her mother’s, Avery’s powers refuse to be contained. When she causes a bizarre explosion at the factory, she has no choice but to run from her lies, straight into the darkest corners of the city. Avery must embrace her abilities and learn to wield their power—or join her mother in the cavernous horrors of the Tombs. And the Tombs has secrets of its own: strange experiments are being performed on “patients”...and no one knows why.
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I'm not going to bother with giving this a full, in-depth review, and I apologize for that, but this book uses a tremendous re-occurrence of a slur (“g*psy”, a common slur against Romani peoples) and makes no apology for it. There's even an author note in the back of the book in which the author tries to justify and make excuses for her insistence to add this book for the sake of “historical accuracy”. That's not an excuse that flies with me, and when I skipped ahead and saw this justification, I DNFed the book. There are many other terms that could've been used to ensure accuracy, that wouldn't have been so potentially hurtful.
Besides the slur usage, the writing in this story felt rather poor right off the bat and the plot was not compelling in the least. I was hoping for a dark, creepy historical fiction, but I was merely bored.
Thank you to HarperTeen for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!
