Lezersrecensie
This book is a winner and it will be hard to avoid going on with part 2, without pauzing.
Set in the world of Gail Carriger's bestselling Parasol Protectorate series, this is the perfect series for old and new fans alike.
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.
Intriguing cover showing a young woman in an old-fashioned and very wide dress.
A big part of the book is about etiquette, dresses, make-up and that sort of feminine things. But at each level something extra is added, espionage, self-defence, attack, poisons...
This is set years after J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter novel and cannot be compared. Sure it is both about educaton on a school of magic but the books are completely unrelated and different.
This series (of which this book is the first volume) deals with some magic (but no magic wands) like the floating school and mechanical staff and animals. But that is all done by technology and hard labour, no real magic involved.
Sophronia is a bit special in a group of very special girls at the finishing school. She soon feels at home which is quite unexpected. The whole book is told from her perspective. She is narrator and main character. 3 friends amongst the other students, a "sooter" from the boiler room and a young girl that would prefer to be a boy. But she is French and knows everything of Paris fashion.
A girl becomes her enemy, there are the teachers who are not really helping whenever Sophronia deems it necessary to break the school rules and a group of real criminals.
Soon the story becomes a queeste for a hidden object and life becomes very dangerous indeed.
Most of the story plays at school, high in the air.
Some very green romance, a lot of laughs, action, psychology.
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.
Intriguing cover showing a young woman in an old-fashioned and very wide dress.
A big part of the book is about etiquette, dresses, make-up and that sort of feminine things. But at each level something extra is added, espionage, self-defence, attack, poisons...
This is set years after J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter novel and cannot be compared. Sure it is both about educaton on a school of magic but the books are completely unrelated and different.
This series (of which this book is the first volume) deals with some magic (but no magic wands) like the floating school and mechanical staff and animals. But that is all done by technology and hard labour, no real magic involved.
Sophronia is a bit special in a group of very special girls at the finishing school. She soon feels at home which is quite unexpected. The whole book is told from her perspective. She is narrator and main character. 3 friends amongst the other students, a "sooter" from the boiler room and a young girl that would prefer to be a boy. But she is French and knows everything of Paris fashion.
A girl becomes her enemy, there are the teachers who are not really helping whenever Sophronia deems it necessary to break the school rules and a group of real criminals.
Soon the story becomes a queeste for a hidden object and life becomes very dangerous indeed.
Most of the story plays at school, high in the air.
Some very green romance, a lot of laughs, action, psychology.
1
Reageer op deze recensie
