Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you delight in a bit of steampunky girl fun, then new student Sophronia’s misadventures at Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality will definitely suit. Sophronia is fourteen, and just not all that interested in keeping a clean hanky on her person – she’d rather tear apart a bit of machinery or dirty her hands, and that simply won’t do. So her mother sends her off to a most unorthodox finishing school, where the girls learn how to turn their feminine wiles into intelligence-gathering, mechanical servants contrive to prevent dashing adventures, and the students dream fondly of the day they are able to poison their first husbands! Of course Sophronia is not able to simply apply herself to her studies. An unpleasant encounter with a group of flywaymen (highwaymen who use dirigibles, of course) on the way to school leads to an alliance between Sophronia & Dimity, both new students, and a suspicion that failing student Monique is not what she seems – a missing communications prototype is linked to Monique, and the twosome persist in attempting to discover the snooty older girl’s secret.

Filled with delightful puns and funny, light details about life in an alternate Victorian England filled with fascinating devices and mysterious alliances, you can recommend this book to fans of similar books like Fever Crumb, Sorcery & Cecelia, or A College of Magics. Fans of the Parasol Protectorate series (Carriger’s books for adult readers) will like this as an expansion of that world.

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