Review of Etiquette & Espionage (Finishing School #1) by Gail Carriger

The first in the author's young adult steampunk Finishing School series offers wonderful, typically strong Carriger women with unique talents, clever minds, a nose for mystery, and next-level bantering capabilities.

Fourteen-year-old Sophronia Temminnick constantly tests her mother's patience, as she's more apt to occupy herself by dismantling a clock or to arrive to tea disheveled, having climbed a nearby tree to ponder life's mysteries, than she is to master the proper curtsy or perfect her needlework, as is becoming to a Victorian-era young lady.

So she is horrified to learn that she's been enrolled in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. But Sophronia soon realizes that the students at Mademoiselle Geraldine's aren't simply learning to dance and dress, but to use household items as weapons, use their feminine wiles to distract, and use diminishing assumptions about young women to craftily spy on unsuspecting victims.

Sophronia is an immensely likable, clever, quick study who defies societal expectations. I loved the steampunk aspects--the airship transport, steam-powered mechanical animals, and the mechanical robot servants within the alternate Victorian England setting. I was also intrigued by the crafty finishing school nemesis, the oddball teachers and quirky school leadership, the persistent young people's shifting knowledge base, and the strange mystery at hand.

This is the first in the four-book young adult steampunk series Finishing School.

I listened to Etiquette & Espionage as an audiobook.

More Love for Author Gail Carriger

I loved the first book in Gail Carriger's five-book (plus a prequel short) Parasol Protectorate series, Soulless and its sequel, Changeless.