Early last year, I grabbed C. M. Stunich‘s Indigo & Iris from the Amazon free list.

Description from Goodreads:
“If I had known last week that I would be sitting in the middle of a Dr. Seuss/Wild, Wild West hybrid nightmare, I would’ve brought more booze.”

Rule One: Gold protects but doesn’t prevent.
Rule Number One Hundred and Eighteen: Do not discredit any information for all things are, in time, inherently useful.
Rule One Hundred and Eighty Seven: Remember the Rules.

They sound more like fortune cookies than bits of advice, but Indigo Lewis is going to have to get real used to ’em if she wants to survive. After eight years on the lam, her maniacal twin sister has finally caught up with Indigo and taken away everything she’s finally built for herself. On the coattails of that tragedy comes Lynx, the man with the goofy grin and the gold epaulettes, who brings with him a train that travels without tracks and an arsenal of weapons that shouldn’t reasonably exist. And all of it for a broken spyglass. Indigo thought she’d seen it all. She was wrong.

Review:
Ok, I’m just gonna go ahead and start off with the same pissed off rant I’ve had about a million times now. (I’m not sure when this became an acceptable norm, but I wish it hadn’t.) Books should consist of at least three important things: a beginning, middle and END. Yes, an end is a required part of a book. Why then, have I read so many novels that don’t have one? Angry, it makes me angry. It makes me want to write off otherwise perfectly acceptable authors out of pure spite. (And Stunich can sure write.) Can’t bother to give me, the reader, an ending? Well, I can’t be bothered to start any more of your books. BAM

This is especially pertinent when speaking about a book like Indigo & Iris that starts out somewhere in the middle, with a whole lot of unsaid history, a confused MC and even more confused reader. For at least the first 50% of the book you have no idea what is going on (and very little even after that). This book is literally like running around with the Mad Hatter and his dozy door mouse. There’s even a lot of tea. But it’s random, unpredictable and makes little sense. However, it does manage to inspire confidence in the reader that at some point it will.

It’s a fun read. Indigo is pretty badass, in a cranky, bitchy kind of way. Lynx is hot stuff, even if he is crazy as all get out. It even manages to avoid falling into unintended YAness. (A trap a lot of books of similar intent seem stumble into.) It’s an adult read, full of cursing and sex jokes. It’s fun. But their vivacious tête-à-têtes and the steampunk descriptions are all the book manages to ride on. What plot there is, is too hidden to even guess at. And believe me, as interesting as the machinery and the characters’ repartee is, it gets old quickly. As did Indigo punching Lynx in the face and pulling guns on him constantly. It was funny for a while, but when it (and little else) happened again and again it lost quite a bit of its lustre.

Then, when it all just starts (and I mean JUST starts) to come together in something resembling a recognisable story arc the book ends. Essentially, I was lost in the beginning but enjoyed the characters enough to keep reading. I then lost patience with the whole thing and wished for a quick end. But it eventually started to pick back up and I became invested again, only to have that relit spark immediately doused by an untimely ending. It’s like an emotional sucker punch. Ha, gotcha!

I’d love to know what happens next. But I just can’t be bothered, because you know what, I’d bet top dollar that if this book ends on a precipitous cliffhanger with no discernible conclusion the next one will too and I’m just not doing that to myself. (You see authors; this is the sort of expectation you’re creating in your readers with all these serials.)

It’s worth noting too that, while well written, there were a few editorial mishaps and a little more attention could have been paid to both textual and digital formatting. There were a number of places where hard returns were missing, creating confusion in terms of who is speaking or reacting to the statement and the font changed sizes several times in the course of the book.