Etiquette & Espionage

Etiquette and Espionage is a novel by the American writer Gail Carriger, published in 2013. It is the first book of the Finishing School series, and it is set in the same invented world as her adult novels.

Sophronia is the girl at the centre of it. She is more interested in dismantling clocks and climbing trees than in manners, and her family can only hope that nobody outside the house ever sees her curtsy.

Her mother is determined that she should be turned into a proper lady, so she enrols her at Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. What the academy actually teaches is not what the name suggests, and the pupils are being prepared for something other than marriage. They learn to handle a fan as a weapon as well as how to enter a room.

The school travels, the lessons include the use of a fan as a weapon, and the girls are being trained for a life of a particular kind of usefulness. The series continues with the books that follow.