Becky's View: Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger

Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger
♦publisher: Little, Brown BYR
♦release date: February 5th, 2013
♦hardcover, 307 pages
♦intended audience: Young adult
♦series: Finishing School, book 1
♦source: ALA

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.

Sophronia Temminnick at 14 is a great trial more interested in dismantling clocks and climbing trees than proper manners -- and the family can only hope that company never sees her atrocious curtsy. Her poor mother, desperate for her daughter to become a proper lady, enrolls the lively tomboy in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality.

But young ladies learn to finish...everything. Certainly, they learn the fine arts of dance, dress, and etiquette, but they 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.

Review: Etiquette & Espionage was exactly what I went in hoping it would be and even surprised me in a few ways!  Such a fun, incredibly well done steampunk adventure!  You can tell at once that this is what Gail Carriger does, she has taken the skill of creating steampunk worlds and honed it into a perfectly refined artform.   This is my first dip into her fantastic worlds but it absolutely won't be my last---I'll be sticking with this series for as long as it rides out and probably seeking out her adult Steampunk titles as well!

As I did suspect from the description, this one reads fairly young; it almost borderlines between middle grade and young adult. This was fine with me as I love both genres.  While Sophronia is 14, the propriety of Victorian England, her own rambunctious attitude, and her love of adventure and climbing gave her an air of childlike innocence.  As for love, there is more of a hint of shy attraction rather than a full blown romance, but the boy, Soap, is such a charmer---I hope this series sees them into their later teen years to see if anything blossoms between them! All of the characters were such fun to read: the weak-kneed and very girly Dimity, her bookish brother Pillover, the snobby and conniving Monique, small but mighty Vieve, all the wildly interesting teachers at the school, and so many more!

What surprised me the most, because there was no mention of them in the description, was the  vampires and werewolves and other paranormals! It's been a while since I've read any vamps and weres...and even longer since I've enjoyed reading about them so much!  The story itself captures your curiousity from the get-go, full of twists and turns and intrigue as Sophronia races to find out the whereabouts of a mysterious prototype and why exactly everyone is so desperate to get their hands on it.

The curtsy! OH how I wish this would be made into a movie just so I can see Sophronia's horrendous curtsy.  The way every person she curtsied to blanched at the horror of her lack of curtsy skills just made me chuckle every time.  So much great imagery brought this story completely to life, the whimsical floating school, the haughty mechanical servants, the sweet and playful mechanimal that Sophronia adopts, flywaymen and picklemen, and their exciting mid-air attacks.  The girls are just learning the art of "finishing" in this first book, but I can't wait to get more into the intrigue and danger of seeing their skills in action!

I highly recommend this fun and adventurous story!

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Purchase Etiquette & Espionage:  Amazon  •  BN.com  •  BookDepository  •  Indiebound