I found it difficult to get into this book and it was on my shelf half read for quite a while, which rarely happens. It has an odd pace to it where it is sometimes very fast paced but at other times it moves slowly. I found it difficult to really grasp what was going on and found it was just a mash of odd sounding names and a lot of running around. ( )

This milder take on steampunk-y goodness was just what I needed to ease myself into the genre and get ready to read Leviathan (which is still languishing on a dresser waiting for me to have time to give it my undivided attention). This is, at heart, a fantasy/mystery book that happens to take place in a Victorian hotel completely run on steam. Upon arrival at the Regency Hotel, Mariah is immediately befriended by Sacha, a young servant girl who is almost as enamored with all of the steam-powered innovations in use at the hotel as she is with Mariah's predecessor, Felix. Sacha's infatuation with Felix, and Mariah's eventual jealousy over it, are the only hints at romance that exist. I read this at the same time that I read Shiver, making the lack of lovesickness one of the best things about this book.

Of course there are lots of other great things going on here too, such as:

* a magic act
* a kraken
* a gruff sailor who knows a mysterious amount of things about Mariah
* a shifty guy on a train
* a pack of cards that can tell the future
* a creepy doll that moves around the hotel without anyone knowing how or why (okay, she's not supposed to be creepy, but I'm not a big fan of dolls the size of 4yr olds)
* and, of course, the title feature: The Midas Box.

The Midas Box does exactly what you think it will, turn everything inside it into gold. It takes an amazingly long time for us, as readers, to discover why there isn't more gold floating around, given the existence of The Midas Box, but with all the other cool stuff going on, I never felt like I was missing anything while waiting for the box to appear.

I did, however, feel like something was missing with the ending. After so much detail throughout the book, I felt really let down by it. (No Spoilers, just to be clear) The ending felt a bit rushed. Everything had to happen before midnight, so things were definitely rushing, which I get, I just wish I had gotten to see more of it. All the good guys split up to run around and perform their various death-defying feats in order to beat the bad guys, and instead of seeing each person's part in the action, we're only shown one or two and then see them all meet up at the end so we know they're okay. I'm not a fan of this sort of thing. I prefer to be shown not told, but at the very least, I want to be told. ( )

Mariah Mundi's job at the Prince Regent hotel turns out to be as an assistant to a magician. The last assistant mysteriously disappeared. Investigating this, Mariah and his new friend Sacha stumble onto a pearl smuggling ring, a deck of cards that can tell the future, and a hunt for a box that can turn anything into gold. ( )

In 1886 England, when fifteen-year-old Mariah begins working at the Prince Regent Hotel and discovers many previous workers have disappeared, he tries to solve the mystery, only to find that nothing is as it appears.