Beast Heart: YA Steampunk Novel With Character Development

It's been some time since I reviewed a book from Meerkat Press.  The last one was Smoke City, an urban fantasy with a historical dimension that I reviewed here.  I received a review request from Meerkat recently for the YA steampunk novel, Beast Heart by Kyle Richardson.  Since I enjoy steampunk, I downloaded a digital ARC from Edelweiss.  I hoped that it would suit my escapist mood.

                          

 
While reading Beast Heart, I was reminded of  a Jekyll and Hyde YA steampunk dystopia called The Heartless City by Andrea Berthot which I reviewed here . The monsters in Beast Heart didn't voluntarily imbibe a potion created by Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll as in Berthot's  novel. Richardson's monsters transmitted their condition by bite like rabies.  Nor were the number of monsters in Beast Heart so overwhelming that the problem was systemic as in The Heartless City.  Yet I could see monsters becoming increasingly prevalent in Beast Heart's timeline if  a concerted effort isn't made to resolve the problem.  There was also a character parallel.  Gabby, the girl who was hunting monsters, evolved from victimhood into someone that seemed very like Iris in The Heartless City, who was a strong female protagonist that I loved.

The male protagonist in The Heartless City was nowhere near as interesting as Kemple in this novel under review.  Berthot's male central character wasn't a monster and seemed very one dimensional to me.   Richardson builds the backgrounds of both protagonists in the course of Beast Heart's narrative.  Readers are likely to sympathize with Kemple over his childhood history of abuse long before he becomes the monster in search of a cure.

Unfortunately, there is a  pivotal plot development that I found unlikely and there is no resolution at all.  Beast Heart ends abruptly becoming one of those books with an immediate need for a sequel that readers will need to wait for.  This strategy reveals a lack of confidence in the first novel's ability to generate interest in the sequel without withholding closure.

Despite the appealing characters, I felt unsatisfied by Beast Heart.  I would have preferred a longer book in which some aspect of the novel is resolved.