Book Review: Finishing School: Etiquette and Espionage

                                              Etiquette and Espionage Review

Etiquette and Espionage is about a fourteen year old girl named Sophronia Temminnick who is living in a steam punk version of the Victorian era and since she doesn't behave in ways that are proper for a young lady in that time period her mother is making plans to send her off to finishing school. Sophronia is against the idea of going to any kind of finishing school since finds lessons in proper etiquette to be dreadfully boring but she soon learns that her new finishing school is unlike any other finishing school since this school is also teaching the fine arts of spying, intelligence gathering, self defense and inventing these lessons are ones that Sophronia finds herself interested in and the ones that she tends to do a better job in since she already had a knack for ease dropping, climbing and messing with her family's mechanicals.

As well as learning the art of espionage at school Sophronia finds a reason to put her newly learned skills to the test when she realizes that her older classmate Monique as stolen an important prototype for the school and plans to sell off the prototype so that she can profit from it. Sophronia along with a few of her new friends spend their free time trying to figure out what the prototype is and where Monique could have hid it and this leads to her doing many things that could get her expelled if she is caught doing them partially because those things are against the rules but also because it would be a sign of being a bad spy if she is caught sneaking around the school.

Overall I really liked this book it was one that had a clear defined world that was different than any other world I read about in the past and I enjoyed that there isn't a lot of time being spent on giving background on how this world works rather this world is just shown to us through Sophronia's eyes and we accept the steam punk and mild fantasy elements this world has. I thought that the premise of this story was interesting and I thought that the characters were pretty good as well. Please tell me your thoughts on this book in the comment section below.