feather_ghyll | REVIEW: Curtsies and Conspiracies

Curtsies and Conspiracies: Gail Carriger Atom, 2013
Finishing School Book the Second

I probably write the same thing whenever I'm commenting on reading a book in a series, but it is too long since I read the previous book in this series and I hope there won’t be as long a period between this and the next, most especially because this exceeded my high expectations. I truly think it’s a step up from the introduction to the world that was Etiquette and Espionage.

Miss Sophronia Temminnick, some fourteen years of age, attends Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. It is no ordinary finishing school. The girls are being trained to become intelligenciers (spies) along with being finished, for who would suspect a married lady of quality (sometimes pronounced qualit-ay) of being a covert agent? Moreover, it’s set in a steampunk version of the Victorian era – the school is in a dirigible - with society divided about what to do with supernaturals: werewolves and, most pertinently in this story, vampires.

Sophronia is growing into her potential as an agent apace. She notices and suspects details others do not, has great resources and is rather brilliant. But when she excels at her six month-review, this puts a distance between her and her class-mates, even between her and best friend Dimity and friends Sadhaig and Agatha. She is forced to rely more on her mechanical pet Bumbersnout, 10-year-old inventor Vieve and king of the sooties that keep the school flying, Soap, for company.

Meanwhile, she can’t help scenting out those conspiracies of the title. Strange things are afloat at the school (I borrowed that pun from the book). In an almost unheard of proceeding, they are to move from Dartmoor to London, and in a not unheard of development for this type of books (Ally Carter did it in her Gallagher Girls series, for one), a representation of the series’s equivalent boy school come along. In their midst is Felix Mersey, not only a viscount, but the handsomest of the lot, and despite Sophronia’s constant putdowns, interested in her. Throw in discoveries about their teachers, lessons about vampire politics coming in handy and favours to repay and Sophronia has a busy time of it.

She also has to grow up a little. The excitement of having found her calling has not waned, but she is starting to learn more about consequences and costs. Furthermore, Felix is having some effect on her, but so, to her surprise, is innate gentleman Soap, even if she is only at the start of her schooling and not ready to move beyond friendship – or is she?

We mainly stay in close third POV, sticking to Sophronia’s busy mind, but then there will come nuggets from the omniscient narrator, giving us a broader view of our heroine. Carriger has written other series set in this universe, which I will get round to reading, and is confident about the multi-layered world that Sophronia is getting to know better.

The author is also inventive. Characters have ridiculous names – Lord Dingleproops! – but are themselves only occasionally ridiculous. There is wit in the dialogue, and it isn’t strained. This wittiness also appears in Sophronia’s appreciative running commentary on various tactics employed by her fellow students or the teachers, or in authorial commentary on social priorities. Sophronia is marvellously cool and calculated, but also a teenager with little life experience. Instead of being divided into chapters, the book is divided into tests for Sophronia. The book manages shifts in tone effortlessly, kept me interested in what would happen next and always entertained, as Sophronia had to save the day, learn her lessons and never, ever let the headmistress, Mademoiselle Geraldine, know what was really going on at the school.