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Today in “utterly delightful things,” I started reading Gail Carriger’s Finishing School series the same way I began reading her Parasol Protectorate series—in a cute rustic cabin in Maine. Her stuff really is grade-A vacation material—light, fluffy, and hilarious.

The Finishing School series is a YA series that takes place in the same universe as the Parasol Protectorate series, perhaps some thirty years earlier. The first book, Etiquette and Espionage, follows fourteen-year-old tomboy and klutz Sophronia Angelina Temminick as she is packed off to Madame Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality, or Quali-Tay, depending on how annoyed the speaker is. Sophronia soon discovers that she is a “covert recruit”, which basically means that she didn’t know about the true nature of Mademoiselle Geraldine’s until she got there. The true nature, of course, is that the young ladies of quali-tay are actually being trained in espionage and subterfuge, of which “learn all the expected social graces of proper useless ladies” is an important part of their cover.

At finishing school, Sophronia makes friends, such as the bubbly Dimity—descended from a line of evil geniuses, but who actually wants to just be a regular proper lady—and a younger Sidheag Maccon, Lady Kingair (who is, if possible, even more awesome than in the other series), and Sophronia makes enemies, such as the beautiful but absolutely petty Monique de Pelouse, a senior who got demoted to debut after Sophronia had to rescue her during her “finishing” assignment. Monique has also hidden something known only as “the prototype,” and they keep getting attacked by flywaymen who want it, so Sophronia takes it upon herself and her friends to figure out what the prototype is of and where it is hidden.

If you know anything about Gail Carriger’s other novels you know there will be at least one dandy vampire, at least one hot werewolf, some dirigibles, and a lot of food. All these are indeed here in abundance. There are also a lot of robot maids and butlers. I really, really want a robot maid, by the way. I refuse to do all the cleaning for three adults myself, but it’s wildly annoying to come home every day to three people’s worth of mess. (Ideally the other two adults would clean but we’re only fifty years or so into that societal revolution, so I can’t really plan on that for the next several decades, apparently.)

The novel also continues Carriger’s gift for comedy-of-manners style absurdist humor, mimicking the affected tone of the best in awkward Victorian humor.

There is also a mechanical sausage dog called Bumbersnoot.

Underneath the seemingly random assortment of awesome nonsense, this is a good solid entry into the tradition of fun, feminist-friendly YA books that I am particularly devoted to. The secret agent finishing school setting  provides an opportunity to have lots of different female characters with lots of different opinions on what they want to be doing with their lives, and in which they are encouraged to get up to all sorts of interesting doings of stuff. (This includes one girl who is not a student—a nine-year-old Genevieve Lefoux, niece of mad scientist teacher Beatrice Lefoux. Vieve is already cross-dressing and already having fabulous taste in hats.) Sophronia also breaches questions of class and race when she makes friends with a bunch of the sooties, the working-class boys who run the engine room in the enormous dirigible that constitutes the school. The head of the sooties and possible romantic interest for later in the series is Soap, a Black boy from South London who is always up for Sophronia’s ill-advised adventures and engages in friendly street fighting with Sidheag.

Overall this was the sort of book that makes me want to make friends with the author and have tea parties with her, although I’d be worried about not making the tea well enough. Alternately, I’d love to attend Madame Geraldine’s, although I’m not sure how good I’d be at the fighting stuff (I am terribly bad at fighting) and I might be too Irish to really be considered “of quali-tay.”

At any rate, it is time to check out the sequel, Curtsies and Conspiracies!

Gail Carriger’s Heartless, the fourth installment of her whimsically over-the-top steampunk “urbane fantasy” series The Parasol Protectorate, continues to delight me, and to cause me to drink tea and say all the dialog to myself in a British accent.

In this one, a heavily pregnant Alexia Maccon, Lady Woolsey, is trying to manage her domestic life, which largely involves buying a town house for the pack next to Lord Akeldama’s house so that Akeldama can adopt the baby and Alexia can live in one of his closets. This is all to make the Westminster Hive of vampires stop trying to kill Alexia and the baby, because vampires are chronically incapable of minding their own business. Then a half-crazy ghost shows up at the new town house and vaguely warns Alexia that there is a plot afoot to kill the queen.

From then on there is a bunch of the usual delightful Gail Carriger-style nonsense involving cravats, naked werewolves, mad scientists, and Alexia being cranky at people. There is a rather touching subplot about Biffy, formerly Lord Akeldama’s drone but now a werewolf and member of Woolsey Pack, and his difficulties adjusting to pack life. Alexia does some investigating of the area mad scientists, the Order of the Brass Octopus, which involves a lot of investigating the past, as well—specifically, the last plot to kill the Queen, which originated out of Conall’s former pack in Scotland. We learn more stuff about Alexia’s father, Alessandro Tarabotti, who has been an interestingly mysterious figure throughout this whole series. And we get to hang out with Countess Nasdasdy and the Westminster Hive, who are thoroughly interesting characters. Carriger’s vampires have some interesting bits of mythology to them that you don’t see much elsewhere, such as that a vampire queen is permanently tethered to her home, and will only leave in grave danger—a practice called swarming—in which she will take all her vampires and drones with her and must find a new home posthaste or she will die. Ultimately, Carriger’s vampire social structure seems to be based off bees.

There is also a good deal of Ivy Tunstell being very Ivy but also very awesome and useful, which made me very happy, because I like it when we get to like Ivy. Possibly the most hysterical scene in the whole books is Ivy’s on-the-fly introduction to the newly official Parasol Protectorate, Alexia’s private spy network. Ivy insists upon ritual and theatrics, and she gets them, and so does the reader.

In other news, I like Conall better this time around, if only because he has the same attitudes about Victorian melodrama as I do (i.e. that it is THE FUNNIEST SHIT IN THE WORLD). Also we see him being a genuinely good Alpha, rather than Lyall having to cover his ass the whole book.

My biggest issue with the book is that the climax of the plot relies upon Genevieve Lefoux doing something that is somewhat unsubtle and basically just plain stupid, which I don’t feel is very Genevieve. The ramifications of the stupid thing are fabulous, though, neatly upending a lot of the social dramas in the book, and Alexia rearranges everything in a way that would make Flora Poste proud.

The new baby also promises to be a thoroughly interesting addition to the series, being a “skin-stealer,” and I am quite looking forward to learning more about “skin-stealing” and what kind of havoc it can cause.

Snowpocalypse. Again. This one I celebrated by drinking copious amounts of tea and reading Gail Carriger’s Changeless, the sequel to her delightful absurdist steampunk fantasy mystery romance Soulless, which I read over the summer (in a delightful rustic lakeside cabin in Maine. God, I can’t wait for summer again).

In Changeless, our soulless heroine, formerly Alexia Tarabotti, now Mrs. Alexia Maccon, Lady Woolsey, is just settling in to her multiple new roles as a married woman, the female Alpha of Woolsey pack, and Queen Victoria’s muhjah, when chaos strikes, in the form of an entire regiment of werewolves camping out on her front lawn. Well, that happens, but it’s not the real chaos, unfortunately. The real chaos is a peculiarly exactingly defined area of London in which all supernatural have ceased being supernatural, as if a preternatural (a soulless person, like Alexia) were continually touching everyone within a certain radius at once. Needless to say, the vampires and werewolves are rather panicked. The ghosts, unfortunately, have been exorcised, and as such have nothing to say about the matter.

As muhjah and a member of the Shadow Council, it falls under Alexia’s jurisdiction to figure out what precisely is going on; as a Bureau of Unnatural Registry officer, it is also of interest to her husband, Lord Conall Maccon, Earl of Woolsey and Alpha of Woolsey Pack. Several unfortunate instances compete for their attention, however—Conall is called away to his former pack of Scottish werewolves in Kingair due to the death of their Alpha; Alexia’s best friend, Miss Ivy Hisselpenny, is engaged; one of Alexia’s intolerable sisters is also engaged, causing the remaining intolerable sister to become so intolerable that Alexia’s Mama sends her to visit; and Conall has left strict instructions that Alexia go hat shopping. The hat shopping causes her to make the acquaintance of a cross-dressing French inventor named Madame Lefoux, who proceeds to follow Alexia throughout the novel—or possibly she is following Alexia’s maid, former vampire drone Angelique. It’s difficult to tell.

Alexia, Ivy, Madame Lefoux, Angelique, the intolerable sister, and Conall’s valet Tunstell (who seems to have an unfortunately requited fancy for the now-engaged Ivy) all elect to follow Conall to Scotland, after receiving intelligence that the mysterious humanization plague appears to be moving towards Kingair pack’s territory. The intelligence is courtesy of Woolsey pack Beta Professor Lyall, an unusually urbane and intellectual werewolf, and Lord Akeldama, vampire gossipmonger extraordinaire, and some of his most effective pretty-boy drones. The flight to Scotland is made via dirigible, and features a poisoning, a shoving-over-the-railing, the theft of Alexia’s journal, much melodrama between Ivy, Tunstell, and Alexia’s sister, and Alexia being entirely oblivious to Madame Lefoux’ constantly flirting with her. In short, it is all wacky hijinks, all the time.

Right up until the end, that is. After a lot of fun mystery-solving and Alexia utilizing her fabulous engadgeted steampunk parasol and everyone getting re-werewolfified and some stuff involving a mummy looted from Egypt during military service, we get hit with a surprisingly heavy cliffhanger of an ending. I am very irritated that the ebook for Blameless is on hold at the library; I want to read it NOW. (Also, I do not understand why an ebook must be put on hold.)

My biggest criticism of this book is probably the rather glossed-over way the British Empire’s continuous military campaigns are treated; while the series does a pretty good job of pointing out several social foibles of homeland Victorian England—the constricting nature of women’s fashion being one of the major targets—the Empire’s relentless expansionism and the werewolves’ military service are presented in a kind of “ah yes that thing that’s going on” kind of way—it’s a bit incidental to the story as everything takes place in England and Scotland, but nobody ever seems to make any kind of even cursorily critical comment about what business the Empire has taking over other countries anyway; it seems to be pretty universally accepted and unquestioned.
My less serious criticism is that just reading about Alexia and Conall’s marriage makes me exhausted; it’s all constant bickering and verbal sparring and incessant amorous activities. (Not to mention that I find literally everything about Conall except the accent to be the absolute antithesis of attractiveness.) But it works for them, which I suppose is the important thing. Their bickering is also quite colorful and witty, which I suppose is the important thing for the reader.

This book is to be read with tea and, if you wish for maximum effect, read it out loud in your very best British accent (except for the bits where you need a French or Scottish accent). It’s great fun, and the dialogue really shines that way—Carriger has really mastered the art of comedy-of-manners dry, snarky humor.

I have been into vampires for a very long time. I started reading Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles in eighth grade, which is way too young to be reading anything other than the first book in that series and I think it may have screwed me up for several years. I read horror vampire novels and paranormal romance vampire novels and ~classic~ vampire novels like Dracula, and I watched old terrible old vampire movies and terrible new vampire movies and parodies of vampire movies and this Eddie Izzard clip:



And then I read books on vampire folklore and the science and history behind vampire legends, from Father Montague Summers’ dense, old-world demonologies to Paul Barber’s gross but eminently readable Vampires, Burial, and Death.

In tenth grade I wrote a research paper on the development of the vampire in stories, noting their periodic booms in mainstream popularity, and I wondered if the next vampire revival would happen in my lifetime. It happened just a few years later, kicking into high gear sometime around my sophomore year in college.

(Overall this has made me as happy as a vampire in a Red Cross donation facility, although I would like to rant for a moment: it is tiresome as shit when people insist on comparing every single fucking vampire story ever directly to Twilight, immediately, as if there are only two, monolithic kinds of vampire story, Twilights and anti-Twilights. The two fastest ways to turn me off a vampire story are to promise me it’s just like Twilight, and to promise me it’s nothing like Twilight. If you’re too stupid to even tell me about the story you are supposedly telling me about, I’m not taking your book recommendations. And if Twilight is your only fucking reference point for vampire stories, you don’t know enough about vampire stories to be telling me anything about vampire stories.)

The point here is, I have read A LOT of vampire stories. So I was very, very excited to learn that Holly Black, fabulous modern Gothic YA writer extraordinaire, was writing a vampire story, because if there’s anyone I would trust to write an absolutely awesome one, it would be Holly Black. I got a gorgeous little “teaser” of it last year at her book signing with Libba Bray and Sarah Rees Brennan, when she read to us from the first chapter of what was at the time her work-in-progress, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown. In this snippet, a girl named Tana wakes up in a bathtub after a party, and finds out that everyone else in the house is dead.

Then I spent a year anxiously keeping an eye on all the news for The Coldest Girl in Coldtown—release dates, cover art, etc. And the book signing tour. The book signing tour included an event at the Cambridge Public Library, two days after the book’s release. I went with a bunch of people from my writing group, and we listened to Holly Black talk to us about how she almost didn’t write the book because she wondered if it was really a good time for another vampire story (thankfully, she concluded that it is ALWAYS a good time for another vampire story), and how she used to pretend her Barbies were good vampire Barbies who could defend her from the evil non-Barbie vampires outside, and all the different vampire stories in varying degrees of melodramatic trashiness that she read when she was younger—Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, Les Daniels. (I had somehow never heard of Les Daniels but it sounds like I ought to go check him out IMMEDIATELY.)  I also got a shiny signed book!

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown is every bit as awesome as I would expect from Holly Black. Like her other YA books, it draws heavily on old stories—and you can tell she really knows her stuff—but it’s also thoroughly contemporary.

The thing that really intrigued me about the worldbuilding in this book was that the development of vampires in society is basically backwards from the way the idea of the vampire has developed through time. In old vampire legends, vampirism was usually a plague—a vampire would be created in a town or village, and it would come back at night and feed off of other townspeople and turn them into vampires, and if you didn’t dig up and kill all the vampires quickly, the next thing you knew, the whole town would be dead. As the vampire moved from a folklore monster into a literary one, and the world moved forward, getting smaller and smaller so it became harder to explain how a creature could hide if it caused mass death like that, and as our fear of plagues dwindled and newer, more modern fears took its place—fear of venereal disease, fear of loneliness and alienation, fear of the world changing too fast, and, in the case of heterosexual women living in a patriarchal society, fear of being attracted to predatory beings with power over you—the vampire became a figure that hid, that went to great lengths to space out the deaths it caused, or make them unsuspicious or unmemorable; in the most modern incarnations, even to feed without killing.

In Holly Black's world, the vampires used to be like that—hidden, nearly unknown. They kept their numbers carefully low so that they wouldn’t come into public view. They had a tightly controlled hierarchical secret governance thing. The process for making new vampires involved the progeny drinking its maker’s blood. It was all very twentieth-century-vampire-novel-y.

Then, about ten years before the book opens… vampirism went viral. A baby vamp with no idea what he was doing went around biting people without killing them. These people would then go Cold—basically, they had an infection that made them crave human blood. It took almost three months for the infection to wear off. If they actually drink human blood in that time, when they’re infected, they turn into vampires. (Weaker vampires than ones that had been fed a vampire’s blood before their full transformation, but still vampires.) In this way, vampirism came into public knowledge, and became a widespread, deadly plague—like in the old vampire folk legends.

The areas with the worst outbreaks were quarantined and walled up. These quarantine cities were called Coldtowns, and the first, biggest, and most famous of them was in what used to be Springfield, Massachusetts. Outside of the Coldtowns, vampires were hunted, and if they were caught, were either killed or sent to Coldtown. Infected humans would be sent to Coldtown if they were found out by law enforcement. Inside the Coldtowns, vampires hunted freely, preying on the population of humans walled in with them, and the seemingly endless supply of humans who voluntarily migrated to the Coldtowns, hoping to get turned into vampires. They also threw ridiculously decadent parties, and filmed them, and put them online. Some vampires basically became reality TV stars.

The most famous reality TV star Coldtown vampires is Lucien Morales, who fits into the fine tradition of batshit crazy, spotlight-hugging blond vampires who revel in being vampires, like Eric from the Sookie Stackhouse books and Lestat in the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles (alright, so Lestat goes through phases of reveling and being broody/guilty, but he’s introduced as a reveler), and Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer—that is the Blond vampire archetype, and Lucien is a Blond. Holly Black describes him as “slick” and having “a face like a pre-Raphaelite painting,” although I’m not sure what that second part means, as I tried Googling “pre-Raphaelite paintings” and they are 99.9% pictures of ladies, but at any rate, there is a fine old tradition of describing vampires by what school of art they look like they belong to, so I’m going to go with it. Lucien throws the bangin’est parties in Coldtown, and he’s batshit nuts, but very charming.

In an interesting break with tradition, the Dark vampire character is even more batshit crazy than Lucien! The Dark vampire is the brunet male vampire who is the love interest and has more of the broody/guilty/missing-his-humanity thing going on. Bill Compton, Louis du Point du Lac, Angel, and Matthew Clairmont are all Darks. The Dark and the Blond are sometimes friends and sometimes enemies, but usually it’s more complicated than that; they are invariable foils for each other. In this book, they are actually described as “frenemies.” Our Dark is named Gavriel, there are about five different plot twists involving reveals of various aspects of his identity throughout the story, and he is actually mad, as in, he’s been tortured so badly that his mind is sort of fragmented, and he says and does a lot of really weird stuff, because staying coherent is very taxing for him. He is an amazing character.

Our main human girl is a high school student named Tana. When Tana was little, her mother went Cold and attacked her, and her father had to kill her mother. Tana now lives with her little sister Pearl and her extremely depressed father. As mentioned earlier, one day, she goes to a party, and wakes up in the bathtub, and everybody is dead—except for her amazingly obnoxious attention-whoring jerkface ex-boyfriend, Aiden, who is infected and quickly going Cold, and the vampire Gavriel, who is chained up and apparently being hunted by other vampires. Tana is almost-maybe-bitten by one of the other vampires in the process of getting them all out of the house, and doesn’t know if she’s infected or not. The three of the head towards Coldtown, where they pick up a brother-and-sister pair of blue-haired teenagers who go by the names Midnight and Winter, and are seeking to get turned into vampires. When they get into Coldtown, things start to get even more out of control.

The pacing in this story is a little odd in terms of page count—they don’t even get to Coldtown until nearly halfway through the book; what the real plotline is going to be—who is the bad guy and why, what is the evil plan they have to stop, etc.—doesn’t become clear until pretty late in the book—but it doesn’t feel weirdly paced when reading it. The story is deeply rooted in the idea of decadence that permeates so many of the older Gothic novels: much of Coldtown is falling apart, post-apocalyptic, insufficiently maintained since the walls went up ten years ago and with a death rate much higher than that of anywhere in the civilized outside world. It’s also bloody as all get-out: although this is a teen book, I think if they made it into a movie, it would be so far into an R rating that it couldn’t be marketed as a teen movie.

The major moral theme in this story is, as Gavriel puts it, the sin of mercy. I found this both fascinating and unexpected, because one of the more frequently-used endeepening subjects of the modern vampire novel is that killing is always inherently bad, and therefore the good vampires feel guilty about this, and they can take steps to try and mitigate it (only killing bad people like murderers and child molestors, etc.), but it’s still bad. Wrestling with whether acting as a vigilante rather than just giving in and eating babies is enough to make one good or if that’s all just rationalization is a classic way to give vampires, and particularly Darks, moral depth. Even Twilight sort of gets into this, with Edward having a broody confessional fit about how he ate a serial killer once in the twenties and that’s why he’s a monster and Bella shouldn’t be with him, and Bella is like “Who cares, you probably saved lives actually” and Edward’s like “It’s nice of you to say that but NO I AM TERRIBLE” and there’s really no follow-up to that, it’s just part of their eternal difference of opinion about which one of them sucks and which one of them is perfection incarnate.

In The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, the idea is that doing the right thing can be hard, and sometimes this is because you are not a sociopath who enjoys killing people, therefore killing someone might be hard, but sometimes killing is the right thing to do. Holly Black takes the old Catholic idea that infects so much of Western culture about worrying about the purity of your own soul over paying attention to the actual consequences of your actions, and throws it out the window, then jumps out the window after it and stomps it into the dirt. There some science talk about accumulated toxins, but mostly, there are a lot of cases in which some entity or other is goddamn dangerous to others and is better off removed from the picture. Tana’s big moral quandaries tend to be variants on: Can she kill without hesitation if she has to? Can she resist the temptation to take pity on the concrete, begging entity immediately in front of her, and save the lives of the nebulous, faceless, not-present, other people that will die if the danger isn’t removed? When is saving somebody a good idea, and when is it stupid? The trouble at the core of the plot all started with one act of badly judged mercy. I found this line of thought particularly interesting because there are a number of really manipulative characters here, most obviously Aidan and Lucien, and it reminded me of discussions over at Captain Awkward about how manipulative people are able to get smart, nice, good people into bad situations by playing directly on their good qualities—loyalty, sympathy, empathy, niceness, sense of fairness, desire to help, desire for inclusiveness, etc.—and the only way to get out of or defend yourself from these kinds of people is to develop the ability to put your good impulses on hold.

There is also a bunch of stuff about reality TV and the romanticization of vampires and death and violence and all that. Particularly involving Midnight the blue-haired runaway, and twelve-year-old Pearl, who likes watching both Coldtown feeds and vampire-hunting shows.

If any of this makes it sound like this book is a deep philosophical meditation on moral quandaries… don’t worry, it mostly isn’t. There some thought-provoking themes there, at least if you find the same stuff thought-provoking that I do, but mostly the book is a fast-paced, decadent, bloody adventure. A lot of authors have been trying to modernize the vampire story lately, the way Anne Rice did in the eighties, but Holly Black has officially succeeded in reinventing the vampire story for the early twenty-first century. I mean, there are gifs. Gifs!

I done fallen behind in my Bane Chronicles reading! But yesterday I finally was able to read The Rise of the Hotel Dumort, which I had purchased immediately prior to my Kindle shitting the bed.

This one is by Cassandra Clare and Maureen Johnson, whose stuff I still really need to get around to reading. It is a properly structured short story, rather than a set of vignettes or a weird prologuey thing, taking place at the tail end of the Roaring Twenties in Manhattan. Magnus has been taking a well-deserved break from Downworlder politics and is having a grand old time running a speakeasy, because of course. This all goes swimmingly until Magnus gets a visit from the police, who smash up his bar, and also a visit from a little flapper vampire, who tells him something vaguely portentous, and then a third visit, this time from a batty, ancient warlock who is also saying vaguely portentous things.

Magnus, attempting to get away from all the random people crashing at his hotel room now that he doesn’t have a bar anymore, investigates, and discovers that the batty old warlock is holed up in the shiny new Hotel Dumont, where he entertains some rich mundanes who are trying to summon a demon or something ill-advised like that. It is around this time that the stock market crashes and all the mundanes freak out, and also when the demons show up, and therefore the Shadowhunters as well, and there is general mass chaos and panic. It’s fun.

This installment stood alone better than the last one, and while it wasn’t quite as funny as some of the others, it still had a fair amount of Magnus being Magnus, and his dry, judgmental commentary on everything fills my decadent Gothy heart with glee, as always. The story kicks off with some jokes about Magnus deciding to become a private eye, and I am not sure the rest of the jokes ever quite top the opening two or three paragraphs, but that is okay, as they are quite excellent paragraphs. EDIT: This is the next Bane Chronicles story. That's what I get for reading them both in one sitting. Jesus, I have not misremembered something I've read this badly since I forgot about Nick going shirtless in The Demon's Lexicon. What is happening to my close reading skillz?! Anyway, if I am not still totally misremembering, I think this means that this installment is generally just more serious and its humor is much more dry and understated than some of the other ones.

It was also fun to read this in a fancy historic hotel and I think if I ever get around to writing an urban fantasy something, 88 Exeter Street will have to feature in it prominently.

I don’t even remember who first told me to read Gail Carriger’s Soulless but I am sure glad they did!

Soulless is the first book in a series entitled “The Parasol Protectorate” and its subtitle/tagline is “A novel of vampires, werewolves, and parasols.” Yeah, yeah, don’t judge a book by its cover and all that but for real, somebody in the marketing department at Orbit Books knows exactly how to get my attention.

Soulless is a sort of steampunk fantasy absurdist mystery-romance-comedy of manners, written in a ludicrously correct Victorian style that I personally found hilarious, but anyone not already into That Sort of Thing might find annoyingly twee. Our heroine is Miss Alexia Tarabotti, a 25-year-old spinster with the misfortunes to have a dead father and a very silly mother and half-sisters, to be half Italian, and to have no soul.

In this particular version of Victorian London, vampires and werewolves are “out” and are respectable (mostly) members of society. As far as their current understanding of science can tell, different people have different amounts of soul, and people with enough excess soul—usually artists and actors and the like—are able to survive the transformations to werewolf or vampires. (The others just die.) Being a vampire’s drone (blood donor and servant) or a werewolf’s claviger (keeper who ensures they are properly locked up at full moon) are fairly popular if somewhat risqué lifestyles/career paths. Far more rare than persons with enough excess soul to become supernaturals are people with no soul, known as preternaturals. Alexia’s father was one, and she is as well (her living family has no idea). Being a preternatural means that Alexia can nullify the traits of supernaturals upon contact; for example, when she touches a vampire, their fangs retract into teeth; when she touches a werewolf who is at all wolfing out, they revert to entirely human.

Alexia is a bit of a bluestocking and enjoys reading, eating, going on walks, more eating, using her trusty silver-tipped buckshot-loaded brass parasol, tea, being endlessly sasstastic, and hanging out with Lord Akeldama, a cartoonishly flaming vampire who is nonetheless absolutely deadly. She also manages to get into a lot of fights with Lord Maccon, the Earl of Woolsey and head of the London werewolf pack, who seems to have had a massive grudge against her ever since an often-referenced incident involving a hedgehog.

Lord Maccon, of course, turns out to be the love interest, so that he and Alexia can sass each other endlessly, including while they are making out, leading to some of the very few makeout scenes I have ever read that I was actually thoroughly engrossed in. I am not a big one for makeout or sex scenes, generally, but the combination of absolute nonstop no matter what was going on sass and the very Victorian and analytical way they are written was actually very engaging. Alexia doesn’t really do the vague sentimental thing; or the getting lost in the moment thing; her perspective on various amorous activities is all very question-and-answer and mentally cross-referencing what’s going on with the stuff she’s read in her father’s books (her father had a rather inappropriate book collection) and generally Scientifick. Lord Maccon’s perspective is less intellectualized but still quite funny. (The POV shifts in this novel are a beast, to be honest; they shift around all over the place.)

The plot begins with Alexia being rudely attacked by a vampire at a party, and proceeds to involve vampires and werewolves disappearing, and new vampires appearing who seem to have no understanding of vampire society whatsoever, a club of scientists called the Hypocras Club, a deeply creepy automaton, and investigations by the Bureau of Unnatural Registry (BUR).

This book, while being entirely fluffy and absurd at all times, is also extremely well-researched, and manages to sneak in quite a few critiques of Victorian England’s various social justice failings, including the insanely silly and restricting views of “appropriate” behavior and life choices for women, the overemphasis on and narrow standards of physical beauty for women (Alexia, being half Italian, is pretty much universally regarded as unmarriageably ugly by all the English humans), prejudice and stereotyping of Italians and the Scottish, restrictive sexual mores, the utter unpracticality of nineteenth-century clothing, and the danger in underestimating people just because they are outrageously campy and dress like circus ringmasters (seriously, Lord Akeldama is quite uncomfortably the Sassy Gay Dude, until shit goes down, and then… well). It’s nothing as deep or going-to-save-your-life as, say, Tamora Pierce’s stuff (plus it is not YA), but it avoids unduly glamorizing or glossing over how utterly stupid the Victorian era really was in many respects.

Overall I enjoyed this novel as much as Miss Tarabotti enjoys treacle tart; the rest of the series is definitely going on the TBR list. Highly recommended for anyone who likes absurd steampunky things (and only for people who like absurd steampunky things).

So, when I heard that there was a steampunk prequel trilogy to the Mortal Instruments series, my initial reaction was roughly what any sane person's reaction is to the phrase "prequel trilogy"--"AHAHAHAHA THAT'S GOING TO SUCK." Then I heard that it was actually quite good, and I was curious. So then I decided to actually read what is known as the Infernal Devices series, which is going to be a trilogy but is currently only two books, Clockwork Angel and Clockwork Prince.

Verdict: So far, not sucky! Series successfully combines all our favorite stuff about Shadowhunters with Victorian period goodness and some funky robots. Plus, lots of references to awesome Victorian novels, including ones that were super popular in the day but are not necessarily still household names to anybody except English students with a particular interest in Gothic novels and/or Victorian literature! (Yet another way that pretty much every other YA fantasy novel currently available is superior to Twilight. But I digress.)

My biggest complaint about this series is that it parallels The Mortal Instruments a little too closely. ...Okay, at times, way too closely. There are reasons that many of the less original tropes used in this series are classics, but still.

Our main character is Tessa Gray, the Unlikely Hero Who Thinks She Is Normal But Turns Out Not To Be. Tessa's parents are tragically dead (duh). When Tessa migrates to England to live with her brother Nathaniel, she is instead kidnapped by two warlocks called the Dark Sisters and mercilessly trained in the use of a power she didn't know she had--when she touches people's personal objects, she can shape-shift into them, and has access to their thoughts and memories. She escapes from the Dark Sisters with the help of two teenage Shadowhunters named Jem and Will. Jem and Will are parabatai, which of course means that they are Pretty Much Opposites In Every Way. Jem is the nice one. Will is a classic "Jackass on the Outside, Pile of Miserable Feelings Due To Tragic Backstory on the Inside" epic-romance love interest. Jem and Will actually both have tragic backstories, and I will say that at least their tragic backstories are pretty non-cliche! (In fact, Will's rather weird Tragic Backstory is as such that I think he will not end up with Tessa until he actually stops being an asshole, even on the outside. So that may be a plus.) Shortly after we meet Will he makes an awesome joke about Lady Audley's Secret and for that alone I like him slightly better than Jace.

Tessa hides out with the London Institute of Shadowhunters, which is run by an awesome lady named Charlotte and her goofy inventor husband Henry, although mostly Charlotte. There is a buttload of Shadowhunter politicking, this time with extra Victorian sexism. Poor Charlotte. They keep getting attacked by robots that are apparently being made by someone called The Magister who we don't know anything about except that he runs a sketchy club for Downworlders and stupid rich mundanes called The Pandemonium Club, and also that he wants to marry Tessa, presumably so that he can control her power. Tessa wants to find out what the hell her Tragic Backstory really is and if she is a human or a warlock or what, and also rescue her useless brother. There is an obligatory love triangle between Tessa and Jem and Will. Tessa makes fun of The Castle of Otranto. Magnus Bane shows up again, which is pretty much the best thing in the series, because Magnus Bane is more awesome than everything.

PS Magnus Bane is getting his own stories soon, yay! Sarah Rees Brennan will be helping write them, DOUBLE YAY!

So last year I read Deborah Harkness' debut novel A Discovery of Witches, which is a paranormal romance about a witch and a vampire who fall in love and do wacky research about supernatural genetics and alchemy. The sequel came out last week, and I wanted to read it enough that I was willing to shell out the fifteen dollars that it costs ON KINDLE because fucking Amazon.

Anyway. It was very good, although, due to the generally impressive level of historical and linguistic research, I was extra annoyed on the few occasions I found things to nitpick (or at least thought I found to nitpick) that were not satisfactorily explained, the main one being the same thing that drove me up the wall last time, which is Matthew's insistence upon having an English first name even when he is having French middle and last names. Apparently, we get exactly one reference to the fact that "Matthew" has an alternate form in French per book. I do not understand why. We spend more time hearing Matthew being called "Matthaios" in this book than "Mathieu," even though Vampire Matthew (I now just call him Vampire Matthew because I don't want to deal with all the names) is not Greek at all, but Philippe is super pretentious and he will call Matthew by any goddamn name he wants to matter what language we're speaking.

...It bugs me as much as it does because the rest of the language stuff in the book is so good. Miraculously, Diana's German is about the same level of rudimentary as mine, so every time German shows up I am about as confused as she is! It is awesome. And there are fun and accurate smatterings of a whole ton of other languages scattered throughout the book, which makes me super happy.

So, at the end of the last book, we found out Diana was a timewalker, and she and Vampire Matthew were preparing to timewalk to Elizabethan England and find Diana a witch to help her figure out her magic powers now that she is not spellbound anymore, and to hunt down the elusive, enchanted alchemical manuscript Ashmole 782, and hopefully eventually solve Diana's parents' murder. This book kicks off by timewalking to Matthew's Old Lodge in 1590. The first half of the book is a little slow plotwise, with occasional unsuccessful forays into trying to find Diana a witch to teach her and little mention of Ashmole 782. Most of the plot in the first half is dedicated to further developing Diana and Matthew's romance, which readers who care about that sort of thing might like a bit more than I did (I used up all my ability to give a shit about people's brooding, guilt-ridden, possessive vampire boyfriends several years ago). If you are not super invested in the romance, it is helpful to be super invested in learning all sorts of crazy shit about Elizabethan England and whatever else the author feels like showing off that she researched, because, like in all of the bestest time-travel stories, Diana has Ye Olde Culture Shocke, and spends a lot of time adjusting to life in early modern Europe at great length and in great detail. Diana, being a historian, basically treats the first several months of time travel as one enormous hands-on research project, learning how to run a large, upper-class sixteenth-century French manor household. (They travel to Sept-Tours. Which is in France. Everyone speaks a lot of French. Everyone calls Matthew either "Matthew" or "Matthaios" and... yes, this irritates me a lot.) They also get married again (this is the third time; in the first book they do a neopagan handfasting and a modern French common-law marriage) at Sept-Tours, so that the author can show off just how many marriage customs she has researched, and also they spend the entire winter there, so we can learn about all the early-modern French harvest and winter rituals and celebrations. It is incredibly fascinating if you don't mind that the plot is barely moving forward at all.

In the second half of the book, we get back on the quest for witch mentors and Ashmole 782, and hang out with bunches of historical figures, some of whom turn out to be actually not human (and some of whom are really annoying, I am looking at you, daemon Kit Marlowe). We chase Ashmole 782 to Prague, because Prague is big in modern gothic novels (it is apparently very sexy), to the court of a lecherous Hapsburg king who is not very bright and is massively petulant, and there is all sorts of douchey court-drama power-playing, which I love (note: I would have been totally eaten alive in any aristocratic court ever. I could never pull that shit off; I'm not quick enough. I think that is why I like reading about it so much).

I don't really want to talk about the alchemy-related plot twists that show up because it is spoilery and pretty much some of the awesomest stuff in the book, and also I'd probably fuck it up. But let's just say I'm really hoping the third book spends a LOT more time on alchemy and Ashmole 782 and less time on history fun facts, even though I like history fun facts.

Also, in this book, Diana spends more time being awesome and snarky and less time being fed tea and eggs and freaking out about stuff, so that is an improvement. There are some real attempts to deal with the "vampires are possessive like whoa" part of the vampire myth without just glamorizing possessiveness as super sexy and not abusive at all, so +1 for feministiness, although I still think that I would never be able to be a vampire romance heroine. Also, there is an awkwardly meta conversation about the trashiness of modern vampire novels, which beats the usual habit of treating the Bela Lugosi Dracula movie as the most modern iteration of the vampire myth to compare everything to, but at the same time comes off a little bit as being "Look, my book is better than all the other vampire romances, see how I can criticize them!" and then I am like "Oh, go find Ashmole 782 already, Jesus Christ."

Also, due to time travel, BONUS VISIT FROM DIANA'S DAD. And of course, bonus weddings conducted by Matthew's dad. Maybe the third book will have more stuff about both of their moms? I love stories about moms.

Overall, I thought this book was very good, although I admit I made fun of it through almost the whole thing, because that is how I roll with vampires these days.

Before I review this next book, I'd like to sing you all a song!

*clears throat, so as to give you time to run for the hills*

Vampires and witches and magic and prophecies
Really old French stuff and university libraries
Trivia, time-travel, and nerdy heroines
These are a few of my favorite things!

What's that you said? "NO MORE BLOODY SINGING!"? Fair enough.

This week, I read Deborah Harkness' debut novel A Discovery of Witches. (Specifically, I read it on my shiny new Kindle after downloading it while waiting in line for the T. YOU GUYS WE ARE LIVING IN THE FUTURE IT IS AWESOME.)

A Discovery of Witches has all of my favorite things. Like, all of them, and then some. What is possibly most impressive is that it is both a vampire novel and a novel that makes me want to live in it just for the food, and while over 90% of my favorite fiction books fall into one or the other of these categories, very few bother with both.

Our intrepid heroine in this book is Diana Bishop, of the illustrious line of Bishop witches, which includes Bridget Bishop who was killed in the Salem Witch Trials. In traditional intrepid heroine fashion, Diana's parents are dead, and much of the plot is very much intertwined with their terrible murder in Nigeria many years ago. Because their terrible murder appears to be related to people finding out they were witches, Diana tries to not use magic, which you know is going to end up not working or there would be no story. She also had terrible trouble actually mastering any spells when younger, which, if you are me, is basically a way of spoilering that she is going to turn out to be the most special super powerful witch ever, but it is done really well so it's okay. Because she is trying to be not magical, Diana becomes a historian, and specifically a historian of science (because science is Opposite of magic), and specializes in... alchemy! And then I go "Ahahahahahahahahahaha seriously?!" but (a) so does every other character and (b) it is sort of explained.

Our male love interest is a vampire! Therefore, I am sure you will be very surprised to hear the following: he is smart, rich, handsome, tortured about his history of killing people, and kind of a dick, where by "kind of a dick" I mean (a) possessive, (b) has anger management issues and (c) has "old-fashioned" ideas about women, because when vampires live for thousands of years and rack up dozens of degrees and read hundreds of books, they do fine arts and STEM stuff only and completely skip over all advances in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, thereby giving an opportunity for the sort of awkward feminism-lite scenes that I never want to read another one of again.

*ahem* Sorry. Apart from the unforgivable sin of giving rise to another incarnation of The Endless Fuckin' Door-Opening Debate, our vampire dude is pretty awesome. Like, he is about as much more awesome than Vampire Bill as Vampire Bill is more awesome than Edward Cullen. His name is Matthew Clairmont, and he is a professor of like fourteen different things related to molecular biology and genetics at Oxford, and he is from sixth century France. He is also about seven feet tall, because in this bit of magical world-building, people get taller when they turn into vampires. (I think this may actually be a version of the vampire myth I have never heard before.) He does yoga, sometimes hilariously. As the book progresses, we learn lots of other seemingly random shit about Matthew that actually turns out to be very important to the plot.

The plot in question is basically about the evolution of the three humanoid magic species (witches, vampires, and daemons), and a power struggle between the current governing body that mandates strict separation between the three species and various creatures who are running afoul of the segregation laws, most notably Matthew and Diana's romance, but also a bunch of stuff including a daemon whose parents are witches and who is pregnant with another witch, some sort of DNA stuff about Diana's parents and the Bishop family in general, daemons getting inducted into a vampire brotherhood that is sort of like the Knights Templar, and some other stuff that I can't sum up in a sensible way. A lot of it involves an ancient alchemical manuscript that has been bewitched and supposedly contains a bunch of secrets about vampires and witches and daemons. (This book reminded me of The Historian in a lot of places; if you liked that, you will probably like this one.)

I think I got a lot more hilarity out of this book than was intended, partly due to my over-familiarity with vampire and fantasy tropes, and partly due to my hoard of totally useless trivia, a surprising amount of which actually shows up in this book, including stuff about obsolete dialects of French and herbal contraceptives. (No, I don't know why I know my herbal contraceptives either. But if I ever need them, I now have an entire tea recipe!) I don't want to spoil why a vampire romance ends up involving herbal contraceptives, but I promise that it is not nearly as bad as Twilight, namely in that it does not involve any mutant half-vampire fetii, at least not yet.

My main criticism of this book is that there are some points in the middle where Ms. Harkness is totally having way too much fun with the sumptuous life she's created for her vampires (and showing off her mad research skills in finding bawdy Occitan song lyrics*), and things slow down into blatant wish-fulfillment territory, so you either have to switch reading modes from "reading a story" to "daydreaming, with textual help" and back, or else its kind of boring and then when Diana gets kidnapped by a crazy Finnish witch and has the ever-loving shit tortured out of her it's like "OH THANK GODDESS."

Despite my complete incapability of reading a vampire story without poking ten kinds of fun at it, I will definitely be seeing the movie version when it gets turned into a movie (it's getting turned into a movie), and I will also be buying the second book when it gets released this summer. The story is going to be a trilogy, where by "trilogy" we basically mean "a three-volume novel," which appears to have pissed off some Amazon reviewers but is completely OK by me.

*Dear Ms. Harkness, DO YOU HAVE MP3S CAN YOU SEND THEM TO ME PLEASE I LOVE BAWDY OLD SONGS

So, when I need "comfort reading," this basically means one of two things when you're me: pseudo-medieval swords & sorcery fantasy about cross-dressing warrior mage ladies, or vampires. I have recently written about Robin McKinley's Blue Sword series (is it a series of there's only two books in it?), which satisfies the first category. This week I switched gears and read two vampire books, one of which was also by Robin McKinley.

So, in all my years of reading vampire books and consuming other vampire media and writing academic papers on vampires and all sorts of other things, I have determined that there are three categories of vampire books:
1. Books that are about vampires and are ~sublimatedly~ about vampire sex
2. Books that are about vampires and explicitly include vampire sex
3. Books that are entirely just vampire sex

Most Victorian vampire novels fall into category 1. The Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles has its first book, Interview With the Vampire, in the first category, the next several in the second category, and by the end of the series is basically in the third category.

Both books I read this week barely squeak into category one, since they both involve a lot of talking about vampire sex or almost having vampire sex, but neither protagonist actually does it, and since they are both first-person narratives, it's really only the protagonist's viewpoint that matters.

Robin McKinley's Sunshine amused me from the front cover onward, because Robin McKinley has been a highly respected fantasy author since before I was born, and I found it funny that she had blurbs from a newcomer like Melissa Marr on the cover copy. But I guess as a YA vampire novel, they figured they were marketing to a slightly different crowd than the one that will read The Hero and the Crown precisely because it's as old as Alanna the Lioness.

Anyway, Sunshine is about an actual Young Adult rather than a teen--Sunshine is in her early twenties, a few years out of high school, recently moved into her first own apartment and working full-time as a baker in a coffeehouse. Her nickname is Sunshine because she basically seems to have a magically extreme form of SAD--sunshine is her affinity element. She gets kidnapped by vampires and wakes up chained to a vampire named Constantine, who was also kidnapped by the vampires that kidnapped her (they are the gang for a master vampire named Bo who is Constantine's main rival and blah blah vampire politics) and is being kept in a big house where there is sunlight around during the day so he will go ~mad~. Sunshine and Constantine manage to team up and escape, because of secret things involving Sunshine's mysterious family heritage, and then things get all awkward because vampires and humans never collaborate, but now they are all teamed up and owe each other their lives and they have to find a way to kill Bo before he comes back after them first.

This book takes place in a sort of post-apocalyptic AU world where charms and wards are as necessary and mundane as having locks and windows, magic users have to be registered with the government, lots of people are part demon-of-some-sort and everyone really, really, really hates vampires. The vampires are ugly and scary and mean and TERRIFYING, like vampires should be, and they are very heavily legislated against, although they still manage to own like 1/5 of the world economy. Several years before the start of the story there was a massive magical world war called the Voodoo Wars, which kind of messed everything up permanently. The world-building is rather complicated, but easy enough to follow if you don't mind Sunshine going off on long explanatory tangents now and again. They are really very interesting tangents, even if they do interrupt the action for pages at a time.

One of my favorite aspects of this book is that it doesn't really follow the regular "vampire romance" plotline... there is a lot of romantic/sexual/generally tense tension between Sunshine and Constantine, but mostly their awkward unconventional friendship just becomes an ever-increasingly awkward and unconventional friendship. They almost have sex once, by accident, which is super weird. But Sunshine ends up staying with and not cheating on her awesome motorcycle dude cook boyfriend Mel, who may also be a magic handler of some sort because he is covered in magical tattoos.

While I highly recommend this book, I do think it ought to come with a big "CARBO-LOADING WARNING" sticker on the cover. Sunshine is a baker, and she keeps going on about muffins and cakes and cinnamon rolls, and danishes, and all sorts of pastry concoctions that she invents herself, and every time I was reading this book I was just like I WANT TO EAT AN ENTIRE CAKE, which I think was only partly because I read most of it on the train before breakfast or after work when it was almost dinnertime. I am craving cinnamon rolls even now, just thinking about the book. Also cupcakes.

*spaces out and drools*

Anyway. The other vampire book I read this week was Laurell K. Hamilton's Guilty Pleasures, the first book in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series, which I have spent like three years avoiding starting because I am a completist and I was afraid I would end up needing to read them all, even after they degenerated into weird vampire porn à la the ARVC. But I am now officially way behind on enough series that I figured it could do no harm to start this one, since at this rate I will get to the Category 3 ones sometime around when I am retired. At any rate, this series does the whole "sexy vampire" thing, although they are still bloodthirsty, ruthless, cruel, and scary. None of them are sad little vegetarians, at least not so far. And they are really powerful and play some scary-ass mind games. Anita is an animator, which basically means she raises zombies so they can be questioned by the police, and sometimes she slays vampires. This gets weird when she is hired by some vampires to solve a series of murders in which vampires are the victims. Along the way towards solving these murders she winds up hanging with a human stripper at a vampire club, a creepily cheerful hit man named Edward, another animator who seems to be not very good at it, and a whole assortment of vampires in varying levels of vindictiveness. She gets injured a lot, and a boatload of people get shot at. It's a fun romp, and I could definitely see it being made into a TV show on a premium channel. I'd watch, and probably laugh. It's not quite as cracktastic as the Sookie Stackhouse books, at least not yet, but I could definitely see it going there.

Eventually, I am going to read every vampire book ever written, I swear. I might have to become a vampire to gain the time enough to do it, but I will.