Author: Gail Carriger
Description (from Amazon.com): “It's one thing to learn to curtsy properly. It's quite another to learn to curtsy and throw a knife at the same time. Welcome to Finishing School.
Fourteen-year-old Sophronia is a great trial to her poor mother. Sophronia is more interested in dismantling clocks and climbing trees than proper manners--and the family can only hope that company never sees her atrocious curtsy. Mrs. Temminnick is desperate for her daughter to become a proper lady. So she enrolls Sophronia in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality.
But Sophronia soon realizes the school is not quite what her mother might have hoped. At Mademoiselle Geraldine's, young ladies learn to finish...everything. Certainly, they learn the fine arts of dance, dress, and etiquette, but the also learn to deal out death, diversion, and espionage--in the politest possible ways, of course. Sophronia and her friends are in for a rousing first year's education.
Set in the same world as the Parasol Protectorate, this YA series debut is filled with all the saucy adventure and droll humor Gail's legions of fans have come to adore.”
Review: So last fall, I discovered the amazingness that is Gail Carriger. I tore through the Parasol Protectorate series, right around the time I got a new job as a young adult librarian. Where, thanks to some somewhat-more-explicit-than-appropriate-for-recommending-to-teens sexual content in the very first book, I don’t feel like I can recommend the series to my teens. Fortunately, in 2013 Gail Carriger published Etiquette & Espionage, her first book for teens. So despite having already recommended it a few times based on the author, I thought I should probably read it.
Etiquette & Espionage didn’t draw me in immediately quite the same way Soulless and the rest of the Parasol Protectorate series did. Maybe because it skews a little younger, maybe just because Sophronia took a little longer to grow on me than Alexia did, I’m not really sure. But grow on me it did, and how.
There are so many wonderful things about this book! There is, of course, Carriger’s wit and comedy. Some of her humor is smart and clever, some of it is pretty basic (seriously, the small mechanical dog “Bumbersnoot”? Made me giggle every time I heard the name.) But the woman has an outstanding and unique sense of humor, and it shines through. There’s also her ability to seamlessly integrate Victorian manners and society with vampires, werewolves, dirigibles, and more. There are the characters who – despite none of them quite living up to the wonderful Alexia Tarabotti – are each their own distinct characters, flawed, likable, and real. I think listening to this on CD added to the side characters, for sure. From Dimity’s understated lisp to Vieve’s perfectly adorable French accent to (of course) the exact way she said “Bumbersnoot,” Moira Quirk’s narration is spot on.
Etiquette & Espionage, much like the first Harry Potter book, is about equal parts main plot (a missing “prototype” that Sophronia’s school nemesis is somehow involved with) and introduction to boarding school (new friends, sneaking around behind the teacher’s backs, school politics.) It’s a good mixture, and Carriger balances the two aspects of the novel well. I suspect, again like the Harry Potter series, that later books will focus a little more on main plot since readers will already be familiar with Mademoiselle Geraldine's. Me, I can’t wait to find out – despite a slow start, I am quite in love with the world of Etiquette & Espionage, and can’t wait to get to Curtsies & Conspiracies. The only question is – do I read it, or wait for a library in our system to get the audio?
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