Review: Cherry St. Croix is corroded
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 22, 2014
When one hears the word “corroded,” one thinks of metal that has been eaten away.  However, in this case, the word does not describe metal but rather the main character, Cherry St. Croix.  Cherry is a collector (bounty hunter) in a steampunk London.  She has dealt with some serious darkness in her life.  Her parents died and left her orphaned.  Then her father re-appeared, but as a mad scientist who tried to kill her instead of the loving father she had once known.  Then she battled a rival collector who, in the end, killed her husband hours after the wedding.  Now she has only one thing on her mind—revenge.  In order to cope with life, she has always utilized drugs, first laudanum and now opium.  She has become a shadow of her former self, addicted to opium and leaving death and destruction in her way as other people pay the consequences for her actions.  The denizens of the Menagerie have sheltered her, but she keeps failing to complete the missions assigned her.  She is attracted and repulsed at the same time by the ringmaster Hawke.  She must stop Jack the Ripper and the rival collector, whose identity will further rip her apart when she discovers it.  By the end of the novel, she has sunk lower than she ever imagined possible.  Is there to be any redemption for Cherry St. Croix?I have not read the first two books in the series, although I have read The Mysterious Case of Mr. Strangeway, a novella that describes Cherry’s first collection.  It was quite shocking to jump from the 15-year-old Cherry going on her first collection to the Cherry of this book.  I definitely want to go back and read those other two books because I do feel like I’m missing quite a bit.  The events from those books were explained somewhat, but I just didn’t feel that I had enough information to completely understand what had brought Cherry to the desperate point we see her in here.  Her whole “relationship” with Hawke is also puzzling to me.  Again, I think I would have to go back and read those other two books to fully understand it.