Reviewed by Angie on
Iron Cast sounded absolutely amazing! Best friends in 1919 with magic and gangsters! Sadly, there was a disconnect for me and I just couldn’t care about what was happening. Corrine and Ada both work at the Cast Iron, a club where hemopaths work their magic. The girls also run cons to bring in extra money, since they can make you see (or not see) anything that they want. But then they’re caught, Ada is taken to an asylum, their boss is presumed dead, and the cops are closing in on them. Corrine and Ada won’t go down without a fight though.
Iron Cast and I got off to a rough start. For some reason I just could not keep Corrine and Ada straight. We’re thrust into this escape plan with two girls and their illusions, and I kept having to go back and reread to make sure I knew who was being talked about. Even once we got to know the girls better, and their differences were cemented in my mind, I found myself mixing them up. Both girls read the same to me, even though they are quite different. There’s no distinct voice between them, probably because this is told in 3rd person POV.
I also just didn’t care about the plot, because I didn’t care about Johnny. He runs the club where the girls live and work, and then he disappears and turns up in the morgue. Corrine and Ada refuse to leave the Cast Iron now that he’s gone, and instead try to figure out what happened to him. I was never given a reason to care about that. We don’t know Johnny, and we barely know anything about his relationship to the girls other than he’s their boss. I did like the reason behind his disappearance and everything going on revolving that. It’s a very fitting use of the time period.
What I did love about Iron Cast was the whole idea of hemopaths. They’re basically people with a kind of magic. Their blood also repels iron, which makes living in cities difficult, but it also makes it easy to pick them out of a crowd. Of course with anything that is different and misunderstood, performing hemopathy is illegal and hemopaths are constantly carted off to a special asylum. This was all fascinating to me! Sadly, it was lost in a plot that I didn’t enjoy.
In the end, Iron Cast was okay. The world-building is pretty amazing, and there’s a lot of other great ideas. But I never connected with the characters or the plot, so I found myself reading just to get through it.
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