Having abandoned my TBR Double Dog Dare plans of reading from my own shelves until April 1st by checking out Speaking from Among the Bones from the library, I couldn’t resist checking out Etiquette & Espionage, too. It might not have been the right book at the right time for me, though: reading this particular kind of YA book after the particular kind of mystery that Speaking from Among the Bones is might be too much light reading all at once. Fun, but a little lacking: now I really want to read something thorny, or something beautiful, or something true.
Which isn’t to say Etiquette & Espionage was bad. It’s the first book in Gail Carriger’s new “Finishing School” series, which is set in the same world as the five books in Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series, which I’ve read and enjoyed over the past few years. Think steampunk alternate Victorian London (this book is set in 1851), with vampires and werewolves and robotic butlers, though the vampires and werewolves are so far more on the fringes of this series than the last one.
Sophronia Temminick, the heroine of this book, is fourteen and a bit of a handful. As her mother puts it, “when she isn’t reading, she’s taking something apart or flirting with the footman, or climbing things—trees, furniture, even other people” (9). Something needs to be done, Mrs. Temminick decides, so she sends Sophronia off to finishing school. Sophronia is horrified, though she brightens up a bit when she finds that her new school is housed in three connected dirigibles “bobbing above [a moor] in chubby floating majesty” (45). And as it turns out, Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Quality Finishing School for Young Ladies doesn’t only teach dance steps and etiquette: it also teaches espionage and intrigue.
And to make things more exciting, Sophronia’s very arrival at the school is fraught with danger and excitement: as she’s en route to the moor with Dimity (another girl in her class), Dimity’s brother Pillover (who’s en route to the nearby boys’ school), and Monique (an older student who’s meant to be on her final assignment before graduation), the carriage they’re in gets attacked by highway robbers who seem to be looking for something very specific, a prototype of something, though Sophronia doesn’t know what.
The book is a mix of steampunk adventure and standard boarding-school-story fare: Sophronia gets to know the teachers and her classmates, and explores out-of-bounds places after hours, and also tries to figure out what the prototype is and where it might be hidden (and what Monique might be up to, since clearly she’s up to no good). As in the Parasol Protectorate series, the narration is sometimes funny, and sometimes over the top, and sometimes both: I loved the introductory descriptions of Pillover: “Mummy and Daddy want him to be an evil genius, but he has his heart set on Latin verse,” Dimity says (19). And then, commenting on how good he is: “poor Pillover can’t even bring himself to murder ants with his Depraved Lens of Crispy Magnification” (ibid.). Also, this, when Sophronia and others are exploring:
Before they could push inside, Pillover said, “Careful! It might be booby-trapped.”
Everyone stopped and looked at him.
“Evil genius training school, remember? I’d booby-trap it, if I were them, and I’m only discourteous genius level.” (pp 190-191)
The other highlight, for me, was getting to see some characters from the Parasol Protectorate series as their younger selves, “Vieve” in particular.
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