A Curse of Ash & Iron by Christine Norris
This copy was provided for free from Netgalley in exchange for a fair and honest review. Thoughts at a glance: **** (I really liked it) It's Philadelphia, 1876, and Benjamin Grimm and Eleanor Banneker, best friends forever, have not seen each other for seven years. Ever since her stepmother threw out his (servant-class) family when they were ten, they haven't heard a peep from each other. Ben divides his time between working with his mother at their family bookstore, working with his father at the theater, and working on his own trying to become an illusionist and feeding his obsession for automata and steam-powered machinery. When he picks out Ellie among a crowd of theater patrons one night, she is even more shocked than he is. When they meet up later on, she confides in him her fear that her stepmother, Olivia, has put a spell both on her and her father - for the last seven years, it's as if everyone she's met has been seeing a girl with some other face, even...