author : Gail Carriger

14-year-old Sophronia Angelia Temminnick is more interested in dismantling dumbwaiters than practising her curtsey. So, to her horror, her mother packs her off to Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies. But even on the way to the school, Sophronia begins to realise the Academy may not be all her mother was expecting.

This is set in the same alternate steampunk-and-werewolves world as the "Parasol Protectorate" series, but several years earlier: we some charaters from that series here as their youthful selves. It is just as fun a romp, but, since this is a YA version of that world, it is considerably less raunchy. We get the vampires, werewolves, and dirigibles we know and love, and an interesting view of the mad scientist secret society that will cause Alexia Maccon so much trouble in a few years time.

Alexia Tarabotti is having a bad day. She just wants to enjoy some tea and treacle tart, but a vampire is intent on attacking her. And they haven't even been introduced! What the vampire doesn't seem to know is that she is a soulless preternatural, whose touch turns both vampires and werewolves human. But why doesn't he know this? All the London vampire hive have been warned about her. Then, while fending off his attack, Alexia accidentally kills him with her parasol. Social solecism number two. The only thing to do in this situation: faint, and stay delicately fainted until the trouble is cleared up, by the extremely irritating Lord Maccon, Alpha werewolf and head of the Bureau of Unnatural Registry.

So starts an amusing and raunchy Victorian / Regency Romance / Steampunk / Vampire / Werewolf romp. It's hard to pin down to a single genre, as it freely borrows and mixes from several, but it is fun. Socially unacceptable Alexia, who has the dreadful misfortune of being half-Italian, cuts a swathe through society as she searches for the source of the attacks on her, not at all helped by Lord Maccon, who has the even more dreadful misfortune of being Scottish. The comedy of manners is lightly amusing (although not as hilarious as the blurb tries to make it sound), the society, where vampires, werewolves and ghosts have been integrated into the world since the time of King Henry VIII, is great fun, and the plot moves along at a grand spanking pace.

Alexia Tarabotti, now Lady Maccon (no, that's not a spoiler: it was perfectly obvious that would be the outcome of book one) is having a bad day. There is something strange going on in London, as vampires and werewolves are forced into human form, and Lord Maccon won't let her get involved. So she gets involved anyway, which leads her, via a dirigible flight (the trains are on strike), to something even stranger in Scotland: Maccon's original werewolf pack that he deserted 20 years earlier.

With the help of most of the cast of the first book, along with a new super-parasol and its inventor, Alexia cuts a swathe through the werewolf packs, to discover what is causing the human form problem. Yet more frenetic running around, marvellous steampunk inventions, and moustache-twirling villains. Alexia gets mostly to the bottom of things, closing out this part of the plot, but there is a soul-shattering cliff-hanger.

Lady Alexia Maccon finds herself in an inconvenient condition. Her undead werewolf husband has cast her off, claiming that it is impossible for the child to be his. Queen Victoria has sacked her from the Council over the scandal. Yet the vampires are suddenly trying to kill her. Why? She needs to flee to Italy, to find out from the Templars just what it is she is carrying. But they have their own agenda where her child is involved.

More mostly light-hearted fun and adventure with steampunk, werewolves, vampires, and parasols. It is fun to watch pragmatic soulless Alexia cope with such bizarre characters and puzzling circumstances. There is a degree of closure at the end, but the many revelations are clearly a set-up for further plot developments to inconvenience Alexia.

Lady Alexia Maccon is finding it difficult to fend of the vampire attacks: being eight months pregnant makes it hard to fight off zombie porcupines. Then a ghost seeks her out to warn her about an attack on the Queen. Searching out the culprit leads her back to a secret about her husband's werewolf pack, and some strange doings of her own family.

More fun shenanigans in an alternate Victorian London, as Alexia stomps around investigating in her own distinctive soulless manner.

The Queen of the Egyptian Vampire Hive has summoned the soulless Lady Alexia Maccon and her Abomination of a daughter to visit her in Alexandria. Alexia wants to investigate the God-Breaker Plague emanating from the same region, so accedes to the demand, using Ivy Tunstall's troupe of actors as cover for her journey. Meanwhile, back in London, the werewolves Professor Lyall and Biffy are investigating the murder of Lady Kingair's beta.

We get exotic locations, more clues as to Alexia's mysterious father, more insight to her own soulless powers, more intervention from the Order of the Brass Octopus, and a new parasol. And a whopping big plot development at the end.