bloodygranuaile

A few weeks ago I had the delightful experience of seeing Gail Carriger at a tea party/book signing at the Brookline Public Library, where I picked up the newest installment of her delightfully madcap steampunk Finishing School series, Waistcoats & Weaponry.

In this one, Sophronia Temminick and a number of her companions plot to escort Sidheag Maccon, Lady Kingair home to her werewolf pack in Scotland, after The Thing happens with Lord Maccon that we had learned about in Alexia’s series, where he goes off to become Alpha of Woolsey. Before this, of course, there is a masquerade ball where, among other ridiculous things, all the household mechanicals go nuts and begin to sing “Rule, Britannia!” and Sophronia gets accidentally secretly engaged to Dimity’s younger brother Pillover.

Over the course of the action-packed adventure to Scotland, in which Sophronia, Sidheag, Dimity, fashionable twit Felix Mersey, and sootie Soap steal a train full of crystalline valve frequensors and their old enemy, vampire drone Monique. They run into diverse problems they must overcome, including low fuel, flywaymen, Dimity’s lamentable lack of cross-dressing savoir-faire, and Felix’s father. In between climbing things, hitting people, and practicing her espionage, Sophronia also has to deal with a lot of tangly difficult mental and emotional issues, such as the obligatory love triangle she’s got herself stuck in with Soap and Felix; whether she wishes to accept Lord Akeldama’s patronage when she finishes; and trying to figure out what the vampires, the Picklemen, the mechanicals, and other interested parties are up to.

My biggest issue with this book is the sad lack of Genevieve Lefoux. No book should fail to have at least a cursory Vieve cameo in it. There had better be some Vieve in Manners & Mutiny.

Carriger seems to get a bit deeper into the numerous shitty social issues of Victorian society with each books, and the results are often kind of awkward, although I think they’re supposed to be awkward. But the fact remains that the stuff that affects the protagonists directly (mostly sexism, although in Alexia’s case there’s also anti-Italian prejudice) is less awkward to read than the stuff that affects other characters and it’s the protagonists who put their foot in it, which happens with some frequency, as the protagonists for both series are straight white gentry ladies. Sophronia’s handling of her obligatory love triangle between Felix and Soap is particularly uncomfortable, because Soap is obviously ten billion times more awesome than Felix, partly because he is a pretty cool dude and partly just because he isn’t Felix.

As usual, the best part about this book is really neither the plot nor the social commentary, but the delightfully absurd language. The worldbuilding is so whimsical it makes Harry Potter look like gritty contemporary realism, and everything has beautifully ridiculous names, both of which reach their epitome in Sophronia’s illegal pet mechanical mini dachshund, Bumbersnoot, who eats coal and occasionally is forced to go undercover as a lacy reticule. Everyone goes around saying things like “I don’t know who you are, but I respect the courage of any man who goes around wearing satin breeches that tight” which I don’t think is an actual thing you were supposed to say in polite Victorian society but who cares. It’s basically complete fluff, but it’s complete fluff with steel-bladed fans and teen girls kicking the asses of pompous adults, which is definitely my favorite kind.

I can’t wait for the fourth one already, especially since I am still very concerned about Professor Braithwope’s mental health.

Because for some inexplicable reason I decided I wasn’t in enough book clubs, I decided to join in on the July book for the Parasol Protectorate book club over at Gail Carriger’s blog. I missed the June book due to library slowness, but this month we’re reading a nineties YA classic, Blood and Chocolate, and the library had enough copies for me to get my hands on it.

Blood and Chocolate is possibly the original horny teenage werewolf story, or very close to it. It isn’t nearly as bad as that description makes it sound, though. For one, the protagonist is herself already a werewolf, rather than a dippy lovestruck human waiting for big werewolf man to save her from the boringness of humanity. There is a dippy lovestruck human waiting for magic to save him, but he is a dude and he also reacts really badly to magic when it happens because he is, at the end of the day, pretty much just a regular person.

The main things that struck me while I was reading this book were (a) I’m actually enjoying this book and (b) I am entirely certain that if I’d read this book when I was actually a teenager, or anywhere near the stage of life this book is purporting to portray, I would have hated it as I have hated few things in this world. EVERYBODY IS HORNY. ALL THE TIME. Not just the werewolves, although the werewolves are certainly like Distilled Essence of One-Track-Mindedness, but also the humans, who, apart from one brief interlude where Bingo and Jem are friends and watch a movie, are just teeth-hurtingly perfect descriptions of exactly the kind of “alternative” teens who think that dressing their one and only interest in life up in different clothes than the jocks do somehow counts as having niche interests or otherwise being different. I attracted a lot of those dudes throughout high school and college and being reminded that they exist still makes me seethe with rage. (Nothing like having your supposedly fellow “different people” insisting that you cannot POSSIBLY be ACTUALLY interested in all the stuff that we supposedly have in common, like they’re all super ~artsy!~ and shit right up until the point where you want to keep talking about art and then they’re all baffled because they’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous as someone actually liking art to the point where they want to talk about it, to make you feel alienated and lied to. Actually, fuck “feeling” lied to. I got lied to, a lot.)  Aidan Teague talks big about how he wants art and magic and possibility, but all he actually wants is a girlfriend and to get laid. Vivian talks about respecting humans and feeling out of place in her pack, but she pretty much just wants to get laid, too. Not a single soul in the book appears to spend even half a second contemplating ideas like “Not ready” or “Not old enough,” which makes both the human and werewolf characters completely alien to me, particularly as teenagers, although I suppose it’s a fairly accurate portrayal of quite a lot of teenagers since I definitely recall those people being around. But at the time I only knew who those people were if they were being assholes to me about it, so it’s interesting for me now, as a twenty-six-year-old, whose social circle is largely made up of people I didn’t go to high school with, to read a story about… well, really, to teen me it would have been a story about those people, with all the Othering and judgementalness that that phrase implies. I don’t know if I could have even finished reading this book if I didn’t have a literature degree, with all the expensive years of work in learning to stretch my empathy and get into the heads of characters that aren’t like me. It was still hard, sometimes, for me to suspend my disbelief enough to engage with the characters, even though I know intellectually that all the stuff that’s hardest for me to believe was actually the nonfantasy element. (I get the feeling that the author was probably one of Those People as a teenager, because, while I may have difficulty relating to hypersexuals and not be able to really grok them, I am unable to avoid realizing they exist; however, one of the hallmarks of Those People is that they are 110% convinced everyone is just like them. Since ever y single character in this book is horny as shit all the time, I’m guessing that that’s how Klaus thinks everybody is.) (Oh god, my asexual elitism is coming back and I’m not even fully asexual anymore.)

Stuff I had no problem reading or believing: Lots of fairly intense violence. Complicated werewolf mythology and even more complicated werewolf pack politics. Murder and mayhem and people dying in fires. I really could have done with probably half as much horniness and twice as much everything else, because the everything else is exactly what I want out of urban fantasy novels.

Stuff that was creepy: The story ends with Vivian ending up with the creepy werewolf dude who’d been previously dating her mom, accepting that she can’t get involved with humans because she’s part of an incestuous little species of nasty, domineering assholes. On the one hand, it fits, because Vivian really is a nasty domineering asshole. On the other hand, it’s hard to root for “nasty domineering asshole finds self-actualization by being nastily dominated by another nastily domineering asshole” as a romance. On the third hand, not all books have to be about people you actually like. Sometimes it’s enlightening to read stories about unfathomable aliens and try to grok how in the world anyone could actually think like that. This is also why I read a lot about serial killers, although a lot of serial killers have more comprehensible-to-me thought processes than Vivian. (Except for the bit where Vivian’s inner monologue has lines that are exactly out of Eliot Rodgers’ manifesto, but the less said about that the better. At least the book came first.) I hate to write a protagonist off as an unlikeable bitch, because YA heroines are routinely derided as unlikeable bitches if they have any personality at all (and as boring Mary Sues if they don’t), but really, this book is only enjoyable if you give up the idea that Vivian is a heroine of any sort—she is an antihero at best. She’s not as bad as the other werewolves, because the other werewolves are basically all tantrum-throwing abusive serial killer child molester stalkers, but she’s jealous, self-absorbed, misogynistic, reckless, game-playing, one-track-minded, smug, rude, mean, and frequently really stupid. She’s confident in her looks, which would be great if she weren’t also incomprehensibly stupid about the limits of physical beauty’s ability to carry the entirety of a relationship. (This seems to be a stupidity shared by the rest of the werewolves, so maybe it’s not entirely her fault?)

This seems to be one of those books that was engaging enough that I liked it while I was reading it, but the more I think about it the more I actually have major, major complaints about basically everything, so perhaps I should stop reviewing it before I completely kill off any fun I had reading it.

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.