This was just as disappointing as I expected it to be. I gave it a chance because I expected to be at least interested in the disappearance of young girls, but it was more about two stubborn girls who tried to be more than they were and somehow succeeded.

From the very first page, I was already cringing at the story – from the second, I was checking who published it and when it was published. It had poor grammar, sentence structure, and pacing (it made me wonder if it was even edited), and I felt like the deductions were too close to the BBC's version of Sherlock for comfort.

It didn't seem like a steampunk story as much as it was an alternate dimension Victorian setting with gears and steam here and there. The language was also too arrogant, as though the author wanted her characters to sound fancy and educated all without recognizing that her audience members are young adults and the words would fly right over their heads; the fancy way of speaking and narration was unnecessary, as it could've accomplished the same effect without abusing a thesaurus.

The two main characters were so similar that I had a hard time trying to tell them apart – and the names didn't help. It was bad enough to have them related to two notable people (one fictional) – which was one reason I didn't even want to touch this novel – but to have them so annoyingly similar made it worse. Their families and lives didn't matter, their thoughts did – and they thought so similarly that they didn't have much separating them from each other – and what they did have, it wasn't enough. I kept going through the narrations and wondering who Pix was for and who the modern day out-of-his-time man (whose name I can't even remember) was for. One being a “steampunk scientist” and the other a ladylike vampire hunter (did I even get that right?) wasn't even enough to differentiate them, and in the end I wondered if it would've been better to make them one person to save us from the trouble of a hate relationship that didn't even have any reason behind it aside from “causing tension”.

The romance was absolutely terrible, too. The girls were swooning over contact with and sight of many men, and it gave off the idea that their emotions were beyond their control – not because they fell in love, but because they were foolish lovesick women who couldn't handle male attention even if it wasn't directed to them. Pix at least was fun to read about, but the inspector and the modern day man were boring and the ties to them were fabricated without any thought to why the girl would even bother liking them.

The two girls were also made to be so much more than they ever should've been, and social awkwardness (and whatever other poor weaknesses they were given) wasn't enough of a weakness to make up for that. The arm wrestling scene was terrible, for example – there was no reason why Pix should've lost to his female opponent (even though she “let him” win) regardless of her strength.

The man who was sucked from the future was so out of place – and that wasn't because he was from a different century and from another dimension. There didn't seem to be much of a point to him, just as there wasn't anything to the inspector – it felt like they were just there to be in a love triangle, and even that failed. Maybe the next book will address that, but I don't plan on reading it unless it costs me very little to go buy it – and even then, I won't go out of my way to do so.

I didn't feel any drive to keep reading, and the plot didn't push me on. Having the women in danger really wasn't a big enough problem to me (at least the way it was written), so I never felt a sense of urgency in the novel and I could've cared less whether they succeeded or not – all I wanted was to see Pix. To have the entire story hinge on the participation of a minor character was terrible, but luckily he was there for me to latch onto because that was the only thing that helped me finish the book. Honestly, if it wasn't for Pix this story would've gotten one star instead because I didn't enjoy reading any part of it unless it had him in it.