There is something about the way that Gail Carriger portrays the characters and actions in her books that just enthralls me and makes it hard to not read through each of them in a single sitting. In the second installment of the Finishing School series, Sophronia is again caught between multiple problems at a time and trying to connect the dots to solve them. We get introduced to the old Alpha of the Woolsey pack and also met a few familiar vampires from the Parasol Protectorate series, including a short cameo of everyone’s favourite rove vampire Lord Akeldama himself. The vampire’s appearance is short but our adventurous heroine catches his interest immediately and opens the door to further contact and story development.
Just like with the first book I was quite sad when I realized that I had already reached the last ten pages of the novel. The story built up a bit too slowly and had so much momentum in the end that a few more chapters would’ve been quite a good addition to let everything cool down a bit.
My favourite bits are the appearances of the characters from Carriger’s previous series because they are such distinct characters that you recognize them even if they’re only briefly mentioned. Also the little hints that there might be some relationship between Sidhead and Captain Niall in the future installments thrilled me a lot. There is definitely a lot potential there for them.
Coming to a conclusion for this rather unstructured and chaotic review I want to recommend this book to everyone who likes to sit back and enjoy a silly book that has a very charming Victorian alternate universe with some steampunk flair and to those who like feisty heroines.