Incarceron - A prison with some odd quirks

Finished Catherin Fisher's Incarceron. This is a kind of steampunk dystopia that shares some common ground with books by Scott Westerfeld, or Suzanne Collins. It was recommended by someone with very good taste who liked it very much.

In the world of the story, a society survived some kind of catastrophic conflict and responded by attempting to eliminate all possibility of future instability. Any trouble-making elements are confined in a vast prison, which is designed as a kind of social experiment, aiming to create a utopia within. The prison's location is a secret, and no one ever enters or leaves. Outside, society has been artificially restored to a reproduction of life in the 18th century, and progress, change, or any use of knowledge or technology which doesn't fit into that era is forbidden.

We follow two protagonists. The first is a girl who is about to marry the prince in a marriage arranged by her father, the Warden, who has sole oversight of the titular prison. The second is an inmate of the prison, a boy who is troubled by strange fits and visions, and who believes he came, impossibly, from the outside world, though he can't remember his life before. Their adventures and discoveries about their society, about the prison, and about their own and the realm's history, give us book one of a two part series.

And, ok, this was not a bad book. Unique world building, interesting characters, political intrigue and some creative ideas.

Maybe I was predisposed to be irritable with it, because the author had a word choice tic that pulled me right out of the plot a few times early on.

On page 23, "something inside her went cold." Well, sure, that's fine, but then:
on page 24, "the threat of his unveiled personality turned her cold" and that exact description "_______ turned him/her cold" was repeated by different characters 3 times or more in the first 75 pages. Granted, there is a lot going on that is creepy, unnerving, unsettling, chilling, and ominous, but surely the very different characters could have slightly varied reactions.

That quirk of word choice got me started noting every repetition or odd phrasing. Soon everything seemed to be done coldly, or arrogantly, and everyone was incessantly scowling or muttering.

Trying to set that aside, I just didn't ever come to really like the protagonists, and some of the central riddles of the plot were never really explained and, well, this one left me appropriately..cold.