Etiquette & Espionage - Gail Carriger The setting of Etiquette & Espionage takes place in Victorian England, about 25 years before the Parasol Protectorate (PP) series and it was nice to see younger selves of some of the characters from PP. Gail Carriger got a special place in my heart as soon as I finished reading [b:Soulless|6381205|Soulless (Parasol Protectorate, #1)|Gail Carriger|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1314020848s/6381205.jpg|6569140], so I was all giddy and excited when this new book came out. While the PP series was written for more mature audience, Etiquette & Espionage is a young adult book, the main character Sophronia is 14 years old.

The world building was really thorough - wonderful victorian dresses, clockwork robots that work as household servants, dirigibles. Also, vampires and werewolves are nothing unusual and they cohabit peacefully (well, more or less) with normal people.

Sophronia is by all means a normal girl, but she’s a handful for her mother. She is interested in clockwork mechanisms, she likes to climb the trees. She doesn’t care much for manners and how to behave like a proper young lady. So her mothers sends her to finishing school, which turns out to take place on a travelling dirigible. But what they don’t know is that this school doesn’t just provides an education in manners but also in espionage and how to finishing everything - including other people and paranormal creatures.

In Carriger’s style, this book was full of hilarious moments. Dialogues are witty, sarcastic, but written matter-of-factly. Sophronia and her classmates are all great as characters, I liked them right away. There is a certain boy, so I think we’ll see some more romance in the book’s sequels.The plot is quite straight-forward and rather predictable, which is the only weakness of this book in my opinion.

Etiquette & Espionage is a fun-packed book with light plot, that I highly recommend. I had some problems with the language which is very 19.century English, but I still enjoyed every word of it.


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