Monday, December 21, 2015

ebook 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.
Fourteen-year-old Sophronia is a great trial to her poor mother. 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. Mrs. Temminnick is desperate for her daughter to become a proper lady. So she enrolls Sophronia in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. But Sophronia soon realizes the school is not quite what her mother might have hoped. At Mademoiselle Geraldine's, 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.
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My Review:

I've been wanting to read this book for a while, but my husband promised to stop calling my reading an addiction as long as I didn't spend ALL the rent money on books. So, I waited for a sale. Was it worth the wait?
We've got a steampunk spy school in a world with vampires, werewolves, and ghosts. What can go wrong? Let's talk about Sophronia. A unique name for sure, from what I know of the word it's a type of orchid that originally bloomed in Brazil, and then grew out of control and almost took over the world! I kid. But certainly a fitting name for our heroine here.
Dimity is also a lovely name - and far easier than Sophronia to read without disrupting flow - bit I feel she might have deserved a more fitting name than, essentially, curtain fabric.
For the most part I read through this book without any breaks, except when something funny happens, like breaking a rule and getting punished for getting caught rather than for breaking curfew, for example.
I adored the climax and ending of this book and very much look forward to the next one.
Overall: buy the whole series at once.

1 comment:

  1. Yay for finding a sale :D I'm doing this one on audio right now and enjoying it too :)

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