Etiquette & Espionage

Etiquette & Espionage

Author: Gail Carriger
Rating: 4/5 Stars
Reviewer: Todd

Summary:
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.

Review:
Taking place in the same world, if not the same time, as The Parasol Protectorate series, Etiquette & Espionage is the first book in the new Finishing School series by Gail Carrier. It’s a good start for the same world we’ve seen before, and more importantly, it doesn’t carry any large overt spoilers from The Parasol Protectorate, making it safe to read without spoiling the story.

The story itself is about Sophronia Temminnick, a fourteen year old girl who is forced by her family to attend a finishing school, which slowly changes as she learns Mademoiselle Geraldine’s finishing school isn’t the typical finishing school. It’s one where the girls learn more than just how to do household management and manners. They also learn the arts such as poisoning, diversion and defense when you can’t have a gentleman do it for you. Along the way of enjoying her new education Sophronia gains friends in high and low places, makes an enemy out of a senior whose plans get botched during their first meeting, and having to deal with flyway men and one of the dreaded Pickle Men stalking and assaulting the school. Thrust into this new world, Sophronia strives to keep her head during her lessons and use them in her attempts to learn about the plot she’s stumbled upon, but to quote one of her teachers, “No one said learning etiquette and espionage would be easy.”