waiting on wednesday (33)

I’m participating today in "Waiting On" Wednesday. It is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, and its purpose is to spotlight eagerly anticipated upcoming releases.

It’s been years now, and I’m not anywhere close to being ‘over’ steampunk.  The aesthetic lends itself to adventure, to invention, and apparently to the hands of some of the best writers around.  One of the most popular steampunk authors is Gail Carriger, whose novel Soulless I lovedLOVEDloved.  Well, now she’s doing all of her fans the enormous favor of writing a YA series.  I don’t know when I’ve heard such wonderful news – this is great for the genre, great for books, and I can tell, just from the cover and description (despite a lack of obvious steampunk), that it’ll be rollicking good fun.  Plus, the name Sophronia?  It can only bode well.  Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger will be published by Little Brown (Hachette), and releases on February 5th, 2013.

It's one thing to learn to curtsy properly. It's quite another to learn to curtsy and throw a knife at the same time. Welcome to finishing school.

Fourteen-year-old Sophronia is the bane of her mother's existence. Sophronia is more interested in dismantling clocks and climbing trees than proper etiquette at tea—and god forbid anyone see her atrocious curtsy. Mrs. Temminnick is desperate for her daughter to become a proper lady. She enrolls Sophronia in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality.

But little do Sophronia or her mother know that this is a school where ingenious young girls learn to finish, all right—but it's a different kind of finishing. Mademoiselle Geraldine's certainly trains young ladies in the finer arts of dance, dress, and etiquette, but also in the other kinds of finishing: the fine arts of death, diversion, deceit, espionage, and the modern weaponries. Sophronia and her friends are going to have a rousing first year at school.

What books are you waiting on?