Maureen Doyle McQuerry’s The Peculiars is a standalone novel.
This steampunk novel takes place in an alternate late 19th century. In this alternate world, the Pony Express is still in operation and there are people known as Peculiars. Peculiars have deformities that mark them as different among humans. To humans, Peculiars are soulless creatures that need to be sent to the northern wilderness known as Scree. The government sends them there to work in mines and helping a Peculiar is considered illegal. On her 18th birthday, Lena Mattacascar receives money from her father, whom abandoned her when she was five. Lena decides to use the funds to finance a trip to Scree in order to track down and meet her father, Saul Mattacascar.
Lena can be quite an annoying protagonist. Although she is very curious and observant, she jumps to conclusions much too quickly. She is bright, but she rarely has enough information to make a proper judgment of a situation. Because of her elongated hands and feet, she comes to think of herself as a Peculiar. A lot of the people she meets associate Peculiars with bad behavior. They call the Peculiars, soulless, godless and no simply no good. When she makes a mistake or poor judgment, she often wonders if she is compelled to do wrong by her Peculiar blood. Eventually, she accepts herself.
The Peculiars was a disappointment. It took about half the book for the plot to pick up and Lena was constantly beating herself up about her Peculiar blood. Lena became very annoying very fast. The love triangle was rushed and seemed like an afterthought. Lena barely showed any affection toward any of the boys until one becomes unavailable. None of the guys seem to show any attraction to her. If it wasn’t for the fact that the summary mentioned a love triangle, the love triangle would have gone undetected until the very end. While both having a love triangle and not having a love triangle in a book are fine, having a rushed and poorly developed love triangle is horrendous. The plot wasn’t interesting until the last 100 pages and the first part of the book consisted of Lena overreacting.