Sophoronia is silly, rebellious, friendly, and skilled all at once, and though I think I’d share her older sisters’ opinion that she’s a bit annoying if I met her in real life, she’s entertaining to read about, and I do have to admire her heart. I really liked that protagonist Sophronia is 14, and she acts like it - a good reminder that YA was more like this eight years ago, focused on characters younger than 18 who acted more like teens than like grown adults.

I’m sure some readers will be tickled by the whole aesthetic, but it wasn’t really what I was expecting and I just didn’t find it that funny. I also wasn’t expecting the characters in a book about a finishing school (which DOES train its students for polite society, in addition to the darker arts) to talk as they’re Bertie Wooster, straight out of a Wodehouse novel, particularly because I believe the time period is a bit earlier than the Jeeves novels. While she’s obviously making little winking jokes throughout the entire book that I’m clearly supposed to find amusing, it just wasn’t my cup of tea. I have to write as a disclaimer that Carriger and I don’t seem to share the same sense of of humor. While Baldwin’s series is immersive, serious, and romantic, Carriger’s is a steampunk tongue-in-cheek take that skews a bit younger. I was expecting something like Kathleen Baldwin’s A School for Unusual Girls, since both novels have the premise that a boarding school for girls is covertly an institution that trains them in espionage, but the similarities basically end there. So it is with great interest that, eight years later, I have finally read this book - and realized it’s nothing like I expected it to be. I have fond memories of constantly seeing Etiquette and Espionage and the other Finishing School books in the library around the time they came out (2013, for this one), always intending to check them out and read them because the Gail Carriger seemed so popular.and never actually doing it. Sophronia and her friends are in for a rousing first year’s education. Certainly, they learn the fine arts of dance, dress, and etiquette, but they also learn to deal out death, diversion, and espionage–in the politest possible ways, of course. At Mademoiselle Geraldine’s, young ladies learn to finish…everything. So she enrolls Sophronia in Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality.īut Sophronia soon realizes the school is not quite what her mother might have hoped. Temminnick is desperate for her daughter to become a proper lady. 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. Welcome to Finishing School.įourteen-year-old Sophronia is a great trial to her poor mother. It’s quite another to learn to curtsy and throw a knife at the same time. It’s one thing to learn to curtsy properly.

Etiquette and espionage series