Can't Get Enough of That Doomsday Song

The Next Day

David Bowie

Released by Columbia

Reviewed by Amanda
4 Out of 5 Stars

For decades, David Bowie has been a musical phoenix—consuming himself in the flames of one brilliant persona before eventually rising from the ashes anew.  While time would often lapse between these musical reinventions, his 2004 heart attack worried longtime fans as year after year passed with no new music from Bowie.  The fanfare surrounding the London Olympics rekindled hope that perhaps we would see Bowie return to the world stage during the closing ceremonies.  Such hopes were dashed when his profound influence on music and style was honored with a tribute in the form of a musical montage and fashion retrospective.  The man himself did not appear.  We became reconciled to the possibility that 2003’s Reality might be the final album and, while superb, it just seemed as though the end had come too soon.  Twas a bleak time for hardcore Bowie-philes. 

So the release of the single Where Are We Now on January 8 of this year (Bowie’s birthday) and the subsequent announcement of an album with 14 all new tracks (and 3 bonus tracks on the deluxe edition) to be released in March was met with much rejoicing and, on my part, some trepidation.  A fan of every Bowie incarnation (with the exception of the 80’s Bowie-lite), it was difficult for me to imagine a world in which my idol could create an album I wouldn’t like.  However, with no original music for a decade, it was difficult to predict which direction Bowie’s new sound would take.  My greatest fear was that he would succumb to the same temptations as many other aging rock stars seeking to recapture past glories.  Would he try to imitate or perfect upon popular contemporary music in an attempt to gain a newer, younger audience?  Or would he unsuccessfully try to return to the musical stylings of his past?  Would he, dear God in heaven no, mellow out and release an album of traditional crooner standards, proving he just didn’t have what it takes to rock and was instead content to totter on into old age, lounge lizard style?  (That’s right--I’m looking at you, Rod Stewart.) 

Despite my worries, I’m still a devout Bowie fan so I pre-ordered The Next Day as soon as its release was announced and waited.  And waited.  And waited.  Finally, blessed March arrived and a ridiculously oversized package for such a tiny thing as a CD appeared at my door.  With trembling hands, I sliced through the tape, pulled out those annoying-as-hell little air bags that seem to go on forever, feeling like the dad in a Christmas Story as he desperately searches through the packing crate to claim his prize.  I removed the final bit of packing and there it was in all its black and white simplicity.  The first sign that all was well was the cover of the new album:  a white square simply declaring it is The Next Day, defacing the stylized pose from the iconic Heroes cover.  This seems to be Bowie suggesting that, while there are subtle nods to the past on the album, this is Bowie now with no apologies and no need to chase after what has been. 

To say The Next Day is Bowie’s best album would be inaccurate, but it is an excellent album whose sound owes more to 2002’s Heathen and the previously mentioned Reality.  Each song has a unique sound as Bowie puts his own spin on pop, rock, and soul.  The opening track, The Next Day, with a driving tempo and guitar, proves Bowie hasn’t lost his edge nor his ability to infuse a rock song with theatrical attitude.  There are several standout tracks here—my favorite is Dirty Boys, a song featuring a sneering, leering groove, suggestive saxophones, and Bowie’s almost sinister vocals slithering around every syllable.  The Stars Are Out Tonight, If You Can See Me, and Set the World on Fire also deserve honorable mentions, as does the instrumental Plan.  The songs alternate between upbeat, positive pop tempos with sometimes surprisingly dark themes, and rough edged rockers with clever lyrics and word play.   The album makes strong use of Bowie’s ability to create pleasing sounds out of sometimes jarring melodies and discordant vocal harmonies (especially on If You Can See Me).  Most of the songs explore the lower registers of Bowie’s voice (to me, this has always been the most appealing use of his vocal range), which have become more resonant with time.  However, he certainly hasn’t lost his ability to make one song stand apart from another by simply creating a new narrative “voice,” evoking a differing tone, character, or attitude on each. 

As the album concluded with I’ll Take You There, my fears had been allayed and I knew that Bowie was safe from musical oblivion.  Forgive me, Bowie, for I have sinned and doubted you.  Never again.  Just please don’t make me wait another 10 years for an album as my penance.

Last Call for an Awful lot of People...

Last Call for the Living

by Peter Farris

4 stars out of 5



This is a must-read book for those who like their crime fiction dark, violent and unrelenting, populated by characters almost all of whom are lost in one way or another, and very few of whom will be redeemed in the end.

Charlie Colquitt comes from an extremely broken home. He's shy, withdrawn, physically unappealing and interested in little more than the model rockets he builds and flys. He supports himself by working as a teller at a small branch bank, and it's his serious misfortune to be on duty early one quiet Saturday morning when a ball-busting, Aryan Brotherhood gang member named Hicklin kicks in the door and robs the bank. Hicklin shoots and kills the manager on duty without a second thought and drags Charlie out of the bank as his hostage.

Hicklin drives Charlie to a remote cabin in the Georgia woods and ties him to a chair. Also in residence is Hicklin's girlfriend, a meth addict whose brain has been fried down to the size of a pea. The woman takes pity on Charlie for all the good that will do him.

It turns out that the heist had been carefully planned by imprisoned AB gang members. It was to be executed by Hicklin and two equally depraved compatriots. But Hicklin jumps the gun by a week, taking all of the score for himself, apparently in the fantasy that he will use the money to run away to Montana and start a new life.

Unsurprisingly, the rest of the gang is not happy.

The thugs that Hicklin betrayed are now hot on his tail, and will deal brutally with anyone who gets in their way. The law, of course, is also after Hicklin, and that includes a county sheriff who's well onto the downward slide into alcohol abuse and irrelevance. What follows from all of this is a gripping tale that will hardly warm your heart but which will certainly command your attention. Peter Farris writes beautifully about some very ugly activity and this debut novel heralds the beginning of a very promising career.

Good Thriller Not to Be Missed...CHEAP!

ISLANDS OF INSTABILITY
M.C. Miller
CreateSpace
$9.99 trade paper, FREE on Kindle


Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A new explosive packs the punch of a 500lb. bomb at microdot size. Who has the dots and where are they going to use them? Problem is - they could be anywhere. Chinese-American competition to extend the periodic table to the next island of stability yields an unexpected result - a microdot explosive. Whoever achieves stability first will have the upper hand - or will they? Not everyone in China favors its new capitalism. New revolutionaries aim at the core of consumption culture. Export MDOT-E in commercial goods and the resulting chaos and panic will precipitate a revolution. The Defense Intelligence Agency must put the pieces together. Their plan tricks former lovers and ex-DIA agents Mitchell Reid and Cole Taylor into working together again. They are a volatile pair, a gutsy choice for a covert mission rushing from Macau to Tokyo to Shanghai. Only Reid and Cole stand in the way of sinister forces. Even a successful operation might not prevent a world of hurt.

My Review: I'm on record as a thriller reader by choice. I choose these entertainments carefully, because a bad thriller is a worse read than a bad example of almost every other genre. This thriller was a LibraryThing Member Giveaway, as it was self-published by the author.

I liked it very much. I'd even go out and buy one. It's nicely written, plausibly plotted, tautly paced, and--for a wonder--actually edited! Most amateur writer/self-publishers don't pay enough attention to the role of an editor in the creation of a good novel. Mr. Miller did. He got good advice, I can see, because the plot holes are few and far between, but also because the thread of a book, the argument it makes about the world, is so consistent.

The settings...Asia's Muslim parts, different bits of China for the most part...are hot spots in the world, so it makes a lot of sense to set a thriller there. It's nice, and fairly unexpected, to see that the politics of the region are thought through and the conclusions the author posits are well supported by the information presented in the book itself.

The main character, Cole Taylor, is well enough drawn to make me suspect that a series is planned. If so, that's a darn good thing. Off-the-shelf woman heroes as written by men are no more interesting than their off-the-shelf male counterparts. Cole is a woman I could enjoy following around.

I expect that Miller will grow as a writer, blowing past the inevitable infelicities of style and occasional lapses of imagination that *every* writer needs to work out and shake off. That there were as few as exist in Islands of Instability is another reason I hope more self-published writers will hire Miller's editor, whoever s/he may be!

Recommended for thriller readers who are getting jaded, for those interested in China's increasing economic and political and military ascendency, and for adventurous lady readers who want a flawed, real heroine to enjoy.

April is National Poetry Month. This Isn't Poetry, Though.

HELLO SUNSHINE
Ryan Adams
Akashic Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now (though why you would want it I don't know)

Reviewed by Richard, 0.0000000125* of five


Why? In the name of all that's holy, why?

Memo to all prospective poets: Line breaks
do
not make
your vapid, tem-
pestuous maunder
ings
poetry.

In honor of it being National Poetry month and all.

The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust’s Shadow

Krystyna Chiger
St. Martin's Press
Reviewed by: Nancy
4 out of 5 stars

Plot Summary

In 1943, with Lvov's 150,000 Jews having been exiled, killed, or forced into ghettos and facing extermination, a group of Polish Jews daringly sought refuge in the city's sewer system. The last surviving member this group, Krystyna Chiger, shares one of the most intimate, harrowing and ultimately triumphant tales of survival to emerge from the Holocaust. The Girl in the Green Sweater is Chiger's harrowing first-person account of the fourteen months she spent with her family in the fetid, underground sewers of Lvov.

The Girl in the Green Sweater is also the story of Leopold Socha, the group's unlikely savior. A Polish Catholic and former thief, Socha risked his life to help Chiger's underground family survive, bringing them food, medicine, and supplies. A moving memoir of a desperate escape and life under unimaginable circumstances, The Girl in the Green Sweater is ultimately a tale of intimate survival, friendship, and redemption.

My Review

After watching Agnieszka Holland’s powerful film, In Darkness, I was delighted to find this story in the library.  After finishing it, I learned that the film was not actually based on Krystyna Chiger’s story, but on an earlier story by Robert Marshall, In the Sewers of Lvov, which covers the same events. 

The Girl in the Green Sweater is told from the perspective of Krystyna, who was only 8 years old when the Lvov ghetto in Poland was liquidated and the remaining Jews sent to their deaths.  The Chiger family had to resort to desperate measures in order to save their lives and spent the next 14 months underground, living in a sewer amid rats, worms, filth, and bacteria.  Many panicked people who descended into the sewers died from drowning or from the grenades thrown through the manhole openings by the occupying forces.  

The family’s savior was Leopold Socha, a Polish sewer worker and a former thief.  He brought them food, clothing, and other supplies they would need to survive their time in the sewer.  Though he was paid very well for his efforts, the work was not without any risk.  In Nazi-occupied Poland, anyone who gets caught helping Jews was punished by death, along with their family.  After the family’s money ran out, it then became obvious that Socha’s intentions were not solely mercenary.

While this story was very grim and showed the darkest side of humanity, there were also moments of humor, bravery, devotion, and sacrifice.  

This story works well as a memoir and survival adventure, but as a Holocaust story, I felt it was lacking historical background.  Though the story was told from a child’s viewpoint, Krystyna was much too young to recall all the events that took place and had to rely on her parents’ memories.  Her father kept a journal and I really would have liked to see some excerpts from it to show a different perspective.  

I can’t help but think that the Chiger family was fortunate to be so wealthy, or they surely would have not survived the war. 

Also posted at Goodreads

City Primeval

City Primeval by Elmore Leonard
Dan's rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publisher: William Morrow
Price:  14.99
Availablity: Now

Career criminal Clement Mansell killed a crooked judge and the only witness to the crime, the judge's girlfriend. Now, detective Raymond Cruz is trying to pin the crime on Clement but Clement is the slipperiest of worms. Cruz and Clement are heading for a showdown that only one of them will walk away from...

As of this writing, I've read 15 Elmore Leonard novels. Many of them have the same sort of rhythm. The bad guys are slick, the good guys are slicker, and you wind up liking most of them to some degree. This one doesn't quite fit in that mold.

The characters drive the story in City Primeval. Roger Cruz, the divorced detective trying to make his squad take him seriously, and Clement Mansell, the career criminal who might just be too slick for his own good, contrast one another nicely. The interaction between the pair make this cop story feel more like a modern western than anything else. Unlike a lot of Leonard antagonists, I couldn't wait for Mansell's has to get settled. He was a reprehensible worm and I had the literary equivalent of a screaming orgasm when he finally met his fate.

The supporting cast was a little light on personality but the two lead female supporting cast members contrasted one another almost as well as Cruz and Clement. Sandy was a pothead who lived in fear of Clement while Carolyn was a tough lady lawyer who was reluctant to let herself need anyone.

The writing was still Leonard's standard style but with a coldness where much of the humor would normally be. Of all the Elmore Leonard's I've read, this one would be the only one that I could see being at home in the Hard Case Crime series.

No complaints on this one. It was quick and breezy and a slight departure from Leonard's normal fare. Four easy stars.

On Goodreads

The Hoard

Alan Ryker

DarkFuse
Reviewed by: Nancy
5 out of 5 stars

Plot Summary

A new breed…a new evil…

Hidden deep beneath its landfill lair of trash and filth, a strange new organism has come to life.  When an accidental fire drives it out, the mysterious creature escapes across the drought-blasted Kansas prairie and finds the home of elderly hoarder Anna Grish.  In desperate need of shelter, it burrows in, concealed amidst the squalor and mess.

When Adult Protective Services force Anna to vacate her junk-riddled home, she moves in with her son and his family.  But there is something wrong with Anna, something more than her declining mental condition and severe hoarding disorder.  Something sinister has taken hold of her, and it’s not only getting stronger, it’s spreading. 

Amidst the wide-open Kansas plains, with endless blue sky above and flat, open vista stretching from one horizon to the next, there is nowhere to hide from…THE HOARD.

My Review

I have yet to watch an episode of Hoarders.   I’m just a little scared that I’ll be able to identify with some of their behaviors.  I’m convinced that somewhere deep down lives a little hoarder screaming to get out.   It is mostly books, but sometimes piles of stuff that I haven’t looked at yet or decided where to put it mysteriously grow larger.  When I was unemployed last summer, I decided it was time to do a major cleanup of my bedroom in order to accommodate the new furniture I ordered.   I went through drawers, the closet, top of the dresser, under the bed, and the armoire.  Books, papers, envelopes, pictures, clothing, yarn, craft magazines, buttons, those tiny plastic bags of extra thread that came with garments I no longer have, gifts from past lovers, pens that no longer work, dead batteries, all got sorted out into various piles – to be discarded, to be donated, and to keep.   The stuff I threw away or donated completely filled up five 30-gallon trash bags.  It took me an entire day just to clean out one room, and that’s probably because I spent an inordinate amount of time looking through many of the items before deciding what to do with them.

My bedroom is now clutter-free, but my husband had to go and buy me an under-the-bed storage bin that I’ve somehow managed to fill up with books, receipts, old bills, small empty boxes that could be useful for gift-giving, you get the drift.  One of these days I need to empty it before it gets stuck under the bed.  

This is the first time I’ve read about a hoarder in fiction.  It is only natural and appropriate that the story of Anna Grish should fall squarely in the genre of horror.  Anna is elderly, socially withdrawn and badly needs help. Her hoard has become completely unmanageable, her cats are neglected, and her house is falling apart.   She has a son, Peter, who has inherited the hoarding gene but is kept under control by his fastidious wife and only allowed to clutter the garage.  

Anna doesn’t want help, but she is forced to stay with Peter and his family.  She misses the comfort of her possessions and Peter notices his mother is different.  Something strange is hiding beneath the layers of filth in Anna’s house.  Now it wants Anna.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story.  It was horrifying, sad, and gripping.  It’s full of realistic and likable characters.  The exploration of Anna’s hoarding disorder, as well as the family’s methods of coping with the problem were sensitively rendered.  

I’m thrilled to have discovered a new horror author and look forward to more of Alan Ryker’s stories.

Also posted at Goodreads

*ARC received from DarkFuse through NetGalley

A Boy And His Dog

Suspect
Robert Crais
Putnam Adult

Reviewed by Kemper
3.75 out of 5 dog-eared stars

My mother is the office manager for a small city’s police department and several years ago I visited her at work, and she introduced me around the station.  The K9 came in with his handler, and the dog ran up to my mom for a happy dog hello.  He noticed me and immediately went into a Who-The-Hell-Is-In-My-Office mode.  The officer gave him the ‘Be cool.’ command, and the dog was instantly friendly.  After a quick sniff to make sure I wasn’t carrying drugs or explosives (Luckily, I had locked them all in the trunk.), the dog sat in front of me so I could pet him.

The cop was standing right beside him, and my mom said, “Just don’t grab his sleeve or arm or anything.”

I laughed a bit thinking she was joking.

“No, she’s serious.  We’re so close that he’d get a couple of good bites in before I could pull him off if you touched me,” the cop said gravely.

I looked down at the dog who nodded as if to say, “Yes, I am enjoying the way you’re scratching my ears but if you touch my guy, I am gonna mess you up.”

Needless to say, I was very careful not to touch the cop.

So that's my police dog story.  Here's one from Robert Crais:

LAPD officer Scott James had the bad luck to get caught up in firefight with a group of masked man that killed his partner Stephanie and severely wounded him.  Months later, Scott is hiding the extent of his physical injuries that should have gotten him an early retirement.  He's also suffering from a whopping case of PTSD and survivor’s guilt.  He has asked to be a K9 officer not because he really loves dogs, but because he doesn’t want to deal with a human partner.

German shepherd Maggie was a Marine who sniffed out IED’s, but she was wounded in an ambush that killed her beloved handler.  Heartbroken at the loss of her master and suffering from the dog form of PTSD, Maggie is about to be kicked out of the LAPD’s K9 program for being too surly and gun shy to be of any use.  When Scott hears Maggie’s story, it strikes a chord, and he’ll need a good partner since he’s still determined to help track down Stephanie’s killers.

Robert Crais is good at writing damaged people.  Whether it’s an ugly childhood like he created for both Elvis Cole and Joe Pike or a cop left shattered by a traumatic injury like Carol Starkey in Demolition Angel or a police negotiator who loses his nerve after one bad day like in Hostage, Crais always makes you feel their pain. He includes empathy for suffering that is strangely lacking in a lot of crime fiction.

So the story of Scott and Maggie is right in his wheelhouse with the two damaged creatures forming a bond.  You can’t help but like these two, and Crais is careful not to overdo it since it’d be really easy to play the injured dog card and ride it right to the best seller list.  As always, he put in the effort to give a quality crime story and not just lean on the tragic parts too much.

However, this isn’t the best Robert Crais I’ve read. That’s kind of damning it with faint praise though.  While I liked it a lot, it didn’t have quite the emotional heft of some of the recent Elvis Cole books I’ve read, and the mystery/action stuff wasn’t as relentless as in Hostage.  But it’s still good, and Crais’s good is more than a lot of writer’s best.

Plus, you know, it’s got a dog in it.  How can you not like that?

Also posted at Goodreads.

Subversive Literature in Nazi-Occupied America

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
Anthony Vacca's rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Vintage (repint)

I don’t know why this is, but for some reason at the library where I work as a sexy librarian (catwoman glasses and tight turtleneck sweaters are standard issue) it has been decided by my co-workers that I am the go to guy when it comes to all matters concerning science fiction and fantasy novels. I find this odd considering I haven’t read a fantasy novel in about eight years and I can count the number of sci-fi novels I have read in my life on one metaphorical hand and still have one or two metaphorical fingers to spare. I have no idea what to recommend these patrons beside some of the obvious sci-fi classics I know about either because of movie adaptations or because I don’t live under a rock.

I am not prejudiced against sci-fi novels (actually, yeah, I probably kind of am: but not in theory at least). One of the aspects I think the genre has that makes it so worth-while is that it is a great vehicle for allegorical speculations about culture and the role of technology within. This is why films like, Blade Runner, The Running Man, Total Recall, Robocop, Alphaville, Brazil (to name a few) are all excellent (in their own, particular ways) pieces of cinema history. I think one of my problems (misinformed preconceptions?) about science fiction, is that the writing takes a backseat for all that speculation. Maybe I can blame all those hours of creative writing workshops and my young love for minimalism (you wouldn’t know that from the way I go on in these reviews), but I am still pretty critical on the whole "telling when you should be showing" aspect of fiction. What does this have to do with sci-fi novels? Well, I am talking about info-dumps here. Unless you are Neal Stephenson or David Foster Wallace, the info dump can be one of the most terrible atrocities known to fiction. They can turn any sense of a natural flow in prose into some kind of mutant creature that flops around on the ground waiting for a mercy blast from a flame-thrower.

Fortunately, we are spared from that in The Man in the High Castle; in fact, it feels like Dick was making a conscious effort to make the world within his sci-fi novel familiar enough so that we wouldn’t have trouble imagining it. One of the main techniques he uses to achieve this is by setting his novel in the present day (at least it was when it was published in 1962) United States. The only difference between our world and the world of Dick’s novel is that, the Allied Forces kind of lost WWII.

Oh, and the Nazis rule the world.

Sure, Japan is still around, and they were given a portion of the U.S.’s west coast for their part in helping out the Third Reich; but now they’re more than a little regretting ever getting in bed with the devil. There is not a lot they can do as the Nazis turn the rest of the U.S. into a violent and crumbling police-state, or as they build gigantic rocket ships towards space (why settle for Earth when you can have the entire galaxy for an empire?)…and we are not going to even talk about the hellhole of a science experiment they turned the entire continent of Africa into. The world is not a better place and, like any good Nazi, they don’t give a fuck.

But these are all the broad strokes of the world Dick is painting; this novel’s focus is not about epic battles of resistance or about the horrors of a dystopian society ran by Adolf and his thugs; instead, this book is essentially an ensemble piece that follows over the course of a few weeks the lives of several different people in Japan-occupied San Francisco. Not all these people know each other or even meet each other over the course of the novel’s narrative, but their lives reflect one another in that Dick uses his cast to work at his central questions of his novel: what does it mean to have an identity in relation to one’s country?

History, obviously, is one way Dick goes about tinkering with his question.

And so we follow around Dick’s assortment of science fiction grotesques: there’s Nobusuke Tagomi, a Japanese businessman who is beginning to have a crisis of conscious about his role as a successful colonist profiting off of the atrocities committed by the Axis powers; and there is Rudolf Wegener, a mysterious Eastern-European diplomat who shows up at Tagomi’s offices with certain information that may change German and Japanese relations substantially. There is also Frank Frink, a Jewish man who has survived the pogroms by keeping his racial identity secret, and who is now working on a scheme to make fake American antiques to sell for exuberant prices to young, chic Japanese colonists. Unfortunately for American antique dealer Robert Childan, he is the poor schmuck who has no idea he is selling fake Civil War pistols. And we can’t forget Juliana Frink, Frank’s ex-wife, who is living an aimless and restless life as a martial arts instructor, but then a mysterious stranger enters into her life…

Like I said, some plot elements tie these characters together, but there is really only two connecting factors that matter. One is the I Ching, which I know very little (and also care very little) about; but apparently it is kind of a big deal for new age and drug-addled Philip Dick, so of course then it is a big deal for all his characters. It’s apparently quite common for both Japanese colonists as well as Americans to consult this work for help in navigating their lives. The passages where characters consult their I Ching decks or whatever are opaque and I guess jam-packed with fortune cookie meaning.

(Rumor has it Dick wrote this novel while consulting his own I Ching deck. Good for you Dick!)

The other thing that ties these characters together is a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is a scandalous best-seller in Dick’s version of America. The book is essentially an alternate history novel in which the author describes a history in which the Nazis lost World War II. It’s the kind of book everyone is reading (even when they are not supposed to): Jews, Americans, Japanese, and even Nazis. What is kind of ingenious is that this book does not tell of an America or history as we the readers know it, but instead it is a speculation of what could have happened. Some of the imagined historical events offered in this book within a book have a pretty good logic and rationale behind them. It works well enough for the characters in this book at least, because no one can predict history or the future exactly…well, unless you have the I Ching…

The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is what helps to elevate this book from being a pretty good pulpy sci-fi yarn, and into a fairly intriguing metaphysical novel. Some of his characters who read this book dismiss it as just sensationalist, and even immoral, trash. Others, like the oppressed Americans (go figure) view this book as something more.

For them it is not just fiction. Not just escapism. Not just another disposable piece of junk "genre" writing.

No, for these deserving readers The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a means for them to reevaluate their own world, their own ideas of self. The book allows them a way to subvert the hegemony of the forces that control the world around them, and allows each reader, even if it is in their own mind, a way to escape to a place that none of the monsters crawling around this world of ours can touch.

And, in Dick’s estimation at least, this is the underappreciated and underutilized power of good old-fashioned fiction, no matter what the genre you classify it away as. Can’t say I argue with the man one bit.

Also Posted on GoodReads

On becoming a lady, and a spy

Ettiquette and Espionage


Gail Carriger
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Reviewed by: Sesana
4 out of 5 stars

Plot Summary:

Sophronia Temminick is hardly a proper lady. She'd much rather spend her time taking things apart than practicing her curtsy. Her mother has entirely given up on her, and sent her away to Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. Little does her mother suspect that at Mademoiselle Geraldine's the course of studies includes assassination and subterfuge along with the more conventional classes.

My Review:

I think that maybe somebody who'd read the entire Parasol Protectorate series to this point may end up enjoying Etiquette & Espionage a bit more than I did. I've only read Soulless so far, which was enough for me to notice that the Finishing School series will be set in the same universe. Fine by me, I really like Carriger's versions of vampire and werewolf societies.

And I did really enjoy this book. It's YA, which is a bit of a change for Carriger. I think she made the jump really nicely by just cleaning up some of the content but leaving the tone mostly the same. She managed to resist the urge to "talk down" to the younger audience, which is a relief. I love the idea of the finishing school, which teaches advanced spying techniques alongside the skills generally expected of a proper Victorian lady. And so our protagonist, Sophronia, learns how to execute both a proper curtsy and an unwanted guest. I loved the idea of their discretion lessons the most: taking tea with a headmistress who has no idea her charges are being trained to be potentially deadly spies. There are plenty of steampunk elements scattered around: mechanical servants, air pirates, mad scientists. They don't intrude on the narrative too much, and I never got the sense that Carriger was overawed at her own cleverness, or expected us to be.

But all that is really just the setting. The plot (aside from the usual boarding school politics) is about a missing prototype of some sort. Sadly, the plot is kind of thinly developed, in favor of developing the boarding school setting. It works, to a certain extent, because I'm really fascinated by the place. The plot, not so much. But there were a lot of open questions left at the end of the first book, and I did feel like they were going to be answered. Maybe I'm reaching a bit, but I feel like this seemingly minor adventure is going to end up playing a much bigger part in the overarching story to come.

Big kudos to Carriger for only giving the slightest hint of a potential romance. Too many books, especially YA books, rush the romance directly from the initial meeting to an all-consuming love in two steps or less. I really hope she continues to handle this well, because I'd really love to see a YA series with a romance that develops slowly over the course of the series, based on mutual respect and admiration. That isn't too much to ask... Is it?

Also posted at Goodreads.