I received a free digital copy of this book from the publishers/author via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

25 years ago, an alien race called the Medusae came to earth to study mankind. After a year of the race floating in the sky, they disappeared and in consecutive years, baby girls were born with special abilities. Penelope is the fifth daughter in her family, something unheard of, and has to pretend to be a boy so her powers aren’t discovered. But one day everything goes wrong, her family are captured and Penn might be the one to save them all.

I liked the premise of this book and the somewhat dystopian/steampunk nature of the story as well due to the mechanical automatons that Penn’s father creates and other human machines like Klok. However, this book just ended up being very messy and the storyline just didn’t really go in a straight line for me.

The first half and the second half felt unconnected. I preferred the second half when there was a set setting and we weren’t bouncing all over the place (there was a point where the settings seemed to change every paragraph or two and left me really confused). I liked the second half in the facility but again a lot went unexplained, and a lot of things happened at once that felt confusing for the reader.