Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger

Etiquette & Espionage

I have enjoyed the adult series by this author called The Parasol Protectorate which features vampires and werewolves in Victorian England. This book takes this already fun format and ramps up the steampunk aspect of it a few dozen notches!

Sophorina is the youngest in a family of girls and when a mysterious Mrs. Barnaclegoose shows up one day offering to take her to a finishing school, her mother is happy, if a bit perplexed, to let her go. Sophorina is such a tomboy, it's hard to imagine anyone could attempt to teach her manners. She packs up a few things and is off. They don't get very far when they are attacked by flywaymen in airdinghies. They are after a prototype and thinks it is in their carriage. They get away thanks to Sophorina's quick thinking and bravado.

The story continues and we learn about Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality which is suspended in the air by multiple inflated balloons. We meet the young people who surely will factor in future stories and learn about this wonderful steampunk setting.

I highly recommend this to lovers of action, steampunk, or just something completely different. 

My recommendation for this book:   

The Anubis Gates (1983)

Tim Powers has written a complex race back and forth through time in this book. Brendan Doyle agrees to host a party of people back through time to listen to Coleridge give a speech in a pub in 1846 London in an event designed by J. Cochran Darrow who tries to describe the time travel as a river covered with ice.

"Right - picture holes in that ice roof; now if part of your lifetime, some section of the seventy-year-long trailing weed that's you, should happen to be under one of the holes, it's possible to get out of the time stream at that point."
"To where?" Doyle asked guardedly, trying to keep any tone of pity or derision out of his voice. Why, to Oz, he thought, or Heaven, or the Pure Vegetable Kingdom.
"Nowhere," answered Darrow impatiently. "Nowhen. All you can do is enter again through another gap."

Unfortunately, Doyle is snatched before the group returns to the area where they return to their real time and he is stuck without money, clothes, or any means to get back. He tries to locate a gypsy who was somehow involved with the time shifts and ends up encountering beggar kings, a body-shifting mass murderer and a woman disguised as a man. The book is non-stop action through the streets, and sewers of London.

So what the hell happened, gang? Doyle thought. The "hellish retinue" sounds ominous . . . and what do you mean by "the Connexion"? He flipped hopelessly to the back of the books, and his eye was caught by a very short note written clearly on the endpaper.
He read it, and for the first time during all his adventures and mishaps he actually doubted his sanity.
The note read: "IHAY, ENDANBRAY, ANCAY OUYAY IGITDAY?" -- and it was in his own handwriting, though the ink was as faded with age as every other notation in the book.
Suddenly dizzy, he sat down on a stack of books, which exploded to dust under his weight, spilling him backward agains onther pile, which toppled down upon him, burying him in damp, disintegrating parchment and showers of panicked spiders and silverfish.

When I finished this book I felt I had just gotten off a wild roller coaster ride. I almost wished I had tried to chart the characters through the time and body changes to see how it would look.

This book was a bit of a challenge to read but I am very happy I finished it.

My rating for this book +++ 1/2

Leviathan (2009)

Scott Westerfeld has created an alternate history where Europe has two facing sides; the Clankers and the Darwinists. The Clankers, from eastern Europe, have developed mechanical machines that mimic the movement of animals and the Darwinists, from western Europe, have fabricated animals to be their war machines.

But Deryn's favorite lectures were when the boffins explained natural philosophy. How old Darwin had figured out how to weave new species from the old, pulling out the tiny threads of life and tangling them together under a microscope. How evolution had squeezed a copy of Deryn's own life chain into every cell of her body. How umpteen different beasties made up the Leviathn - from the microscopic hydrogen-farting bacteria in its belly to the great harnessed whale. How the airship's creatures, like the res of Nature, were always struggling among themselves in messy, snarling equilibrium.

Alek finds himself orphaned, his father Austrian Duke Ferdinand and his less-than-royally born mother have been killed. Alek is spirited away by two of the Duke's men who take him to a hideaway in the Alps, set up for just an occasion. Deryn is a young English woman who disguises herself as a man (Dylan) to enter the British Air Service and gets a position on the Leviathan, a fabricated whale with the ability to generate enough hydrogen to take it aloft. When taking a secret cargo to the Ottoman Empire, they are attacked and crash in, you guessed it, the Alps.

Deryn had always reckoned herself a tomboy, between Jaspert's bullying and Da's balloon training. But running with the other middies was mroe than just punchups and tying knots - it was like joining a pack of dogs. They jostled and banged for the best seats at the middies' mess table. They taunted each other over signal reading and navigation scores, and whom the officers had complimented that day. They endlessly competed to see who could spit farther, drink rum faster, or belch the loudest.
It was bloody exhausting, being a boy.

This exciting action is enhanced by illustrations by Keith Thompson which help the reader get a vision of the size and complexity of the machines described. There will be a sequel to continue the action. This is a real page turner with nonstop action. I highly recommend this book to science fiction and war fiction readers.

My rating for this book: ++++