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Reviewed by:
  • The Inventor’s Secret by Andrea Cremer
  • Kate Quealy-Gainer
Cremer, Andrea. The Inventor’s Secret. Philomel, 2014. [384p]. ISBN 978-0-399-15962-6 $18.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 7-10.

Forty years after the Brits quashed the American Revolution, Boston is a city-sized prison while New York is a mechanized, floating wonder. Descendants of the rebels are enslaved and giant robots hunt down any escapees; a small core of free-thinking teenagers hides out in the underground Catacombs outside the cities, conspiring against the Empire. Sixteen-year-old Charlotte is out on a supply run in the wilderness when she stumbles across an amnesiac boy and brings him back to Resistance headquarters. There’s something strange about the boy, though, and Charlotte, her brother (the leader of the resistance), and his best friend Jack (and Charlotte’s sometime love interest) decide the best course of action is to disguise themselves as elite members of society using Jack’s upper-class connections and return the boy to the city while they’re meeting up with another resistance faction. The premise and the world are intriguing, and there’s a formality to the descriptions of shining floating cities, mechanized underwater submarines, and slightly creepy automatons that gives the steampunk setting a tarnished grandeur. Unfortunately, once the group gets to the city, the story shifts its focus abruptly from the mystery behind the boy to Charlotte’s affair with Jack, which at first seems like a sure thing but is then jeopardized by both Jack’s high-society fiancée and his handsome more attentive older brother. Readers who value romance over plot, however, may nonetheless be taken in by Charlotte and Jack’s witty repartee and steamy encounters, and their estrangement at the book’s close ensures a sequel.

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