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Last week, I wrote about Mary Balogh’s Survivors’ Club series. Jackie gave us photos of a house where Paul McCartney (swoon) once lived in Liverpool. Sim’s fantasy walk in London took us to sites in Hammersmith including the school where Benedict Cumberbatch (swoon, again) studied acting. Tina indulged her Anglophile side at the library and came home with a movie and two books. Becky reviewed the third book in Anne Perry’s William Monk series.

Book: Manners & Mutiny by Gail Carriger
Genre: YA
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Publication date: 2015
Pages: 326

Source: e-book from library

Fourth, and final, installment of the Finishing School series

Summary: Manners & Mutiny is the fourth and final book in the Finishing School series. Sophronia, yet again, needs to save her world from the dangerous Picklemen — all the while retaining her training in good manners and polite espionage. There are many satisfying surprises that I won’t reveal to avoid spoiling any one’s experience of reading this series.

Thoughts: Like the novelists whose series books I reviewed earlier this week, Gail Carriger is an author that I can always count on for comfort in trying times. Carriger gives the added element of humor and, of course, one of my favorite settings — London and nearby parts of England.

The Finishing School books are a YA series set in the same world as Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series for adults, but a generation earlier. I reviewed the first two Finishing School books in one post and the third in a multi-review post.

I’ve read so many Carriger books that it’s hard to believe that she was new to me in 2014.  She’s started a whole new series, another generation past the Parasol Protectorate — the Custard Protocol. If the titles of those two series make you laugh, you’ll probably enjoy these books. The first book in the Custard Protocol, Prudence, is out now. The second, Imprudence, will be available this summer.

Appeal: Manners & Mutiny has steam-punk, fantasy, alternate history, adventure, and lots of humor. It’s YA, so appropriate for the younger crowd (although none of the Carriger novels are particularly inappropriate — they are Victorian, after all). I think it’s best to read this series in order because the four books tell a whole story across the volumes — the first book is Etiquette & Espionage.