Review: Etiquette & Espionage

Remember how I said I was going to talk about Gail Carriger's other series, the Finishing School books, later?

It's later.

After a surprise visit from the headmistress, Sophronia Angelina Temminnick's mother is shipping her off to Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. Sophronia's always been more interested in sneaking around the house to eavesdrop than becoming a proper young lady, so she's not super interested in this prospect, understandably.

At least until the flywaymen attack.

It's revealed that the "headmistress" was actually a disguised student named Monique, and the robbers are demanding she hand over the prototype, whatever that is. When they wrestle her out of the carriage, it's up to Sophronia, another recruit named Dimity, and Dimity's brother Pillover to rescue Monique and get back on course to their respective schools.

And that's not even the biggest reveal of the day: for one, Mademoiselle Geraldine's isn't a building - it's a floating dirigible. For two, it's not just a normal finishing school. It's a school for intelligencers, and Sophronia's their newest covert recruit, one of the few students who doesn't have a family history of attendance.

Sophronia's got natural talent for spying, though, and she starts to put it to some unsanctioned uses: namely, figuring out what exactly the prototype is, and why Monique would go so far to take it for herself. After all, Monique ended up sabotaging her entire academic career for it, since she's now back in the debut classes with Sophronia and her friends.

With some assistance from a mechanimal, the sooties, and an ingenuitive little girl named Vieve, Sophronia figures out that things should come to a head the night of her older sister's coming out ball. Will she and Dimity be able to rescue the prototype without revealing too much of what they're actually learning at finishing school? (Since there's a book two, signs point to yes.)

Etiquette & Espionage is a combination of some of my favorite tropes: girls attending secret spy schools, historical AUs, and femininity as its own kind of power. It's also got the bubbly, quirky writing style of the Parasol Protectorate series, so it feels fun to read, especially when characters from Carriger's original series make appearances in this YA spinoff. Seeing the familiar universe in a different context is one of my favorite parts of this series.

Carriger's talent for writing unique, fun characters is still going in the Finishing School series, too. The teachers especially are all wildly different, and they kind of feel like Hogwarts professors mixed with particularly flamboyant stage performers. Since I really love side characters with big personalities, I'm consistently enamored with Carriger's books.

Overall, Etiquette & Espionage is a supremely entertaining novel that doesn't really depend on prior knowledge of Carriger's other books to be enjoyable. If its description strikes your fancy more than Alexia's books do, feel free to jump right in. Five stars.