Review: Etiquette and Espionage

It’s one thing to learn to curtsy properly. It’s quite another to learn to curtsy and throw a knife at the same time. Welcome to Finishing School.

Sophronia Temminnick at 14 is a great trial more interested in dismantling clocks and climbing trees than proper manners — and the family can only hope that company never sees her atrocious curtsy. Her poor mother, desperate for her daughter to become a proper lady, enrolls the lively tomboy in Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality.

But young ladies learn to finish…everything. 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. Sophronia and her friends are in for a rousing first year’s education.

I am a big¹ fan of Gail Carriger’s adult series The Parasol Protectorate, so when I learned that she was writing a young adult series set in the same universe I was really excited. However I was also a little nervous, wondering how Carriger and her universe would take to the very different beast that is YA fiction.

So how did Carriger and Etiquette and Espionage do? High marks.

In taking us back 25 years before the events of Soulless we get to see a new side of the universe – and of characters we first met as adults. Technology that was present in Soulless either does not exist yet or is just being developed and the few crossover characters we meet are much younger. I won’t tell you which ones do appear (because spoilers) but if you are anything like me you’ll be delighted at seeing them again, albeit quite wee.

Etiquette and Espionage really showcases Carriger’s fantastic imagination. While the plot was surprising and twisty enough, it was her extensions to the universe that really surprised me. I thought I had had a handle on what to expect but I was blown out of the water by the setting of the finishing school itself – I immediately started imagining what it would look like in a movie and how amazing it would be to see it brought to life². It was grand, it was impressive and it was fantastically described in all its layers. The same could be said for other parts of the world – from schools of this kind to high-speed chases – all fit in perfectly and expand and enhance rather than detract from the world I loved in The Parasol Protectorate.

One big departure from the adult Parasol books is the lack of romance. Soulless and its sequels are romance novels and contain a lot of the standards and tropes of the genre. This is not so in Etiquette and Espionage where, apart from some minor hints of future potential and some tittering about boys, there is no romance. This is, first and foremost, a book about girls and their relationships with each other: their immediate friendships, the ones that grow with time and their rivalries. It is a book about the great things girls can do (both on the whole and using what is expected of them as girls) and the adventures they can have together. After so many books that put the male love interest above any possibility of female friends/have all the female characters be antagonistic, this was a wonderful and refreshing thing to note.

There was only one main flaw with Etiquette and Espionage, and that was that it ended. There is a sequel, but unfortunately I am going to have to wait far too long before it comes out. At least they have already unveiled the cover for the second book in the series, Curtsies and Conspiracies.

1. I won’t say biggest as I, very sadly, have yet to read the final book in the series, Timeless, and the manga adaptations of Soulless
2. Maybe in the style of Miyazaki?