Finishing School

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 a great trial to her poor mother. Sophronia is more interested in dismantling clocks and climbing trees than proper manners - and the family can only hope that company never sees her atrocious curtsy. Mrs. Temminnick is desperate for her daughter to become a proper lady. So she enrolls Sophronia in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. But Sophronia soon realizes the school is not quite what her mother might have hoped.

Does one need four fully-grown foxgloves for decorating a dinner table for six guests? Or is it six foxgloves to kill four fully-grown guests? Sophronia's first year at school has certainly been rousing. First, her finishing school is training her to be a spy. (Won't Mumsy be surprised!) Secondly, she gets mixed up in an intrigue over a stolen device and has a cheese pie thrown at her.

Sophronia continues her second year at finishing school in style - with a steel-bladed fan secreted in the folds of her ball gown, of course. Such a fashionable choice of weapon comes in handy when Sophronia, her best friend Dimity, sweet sootie Soap, and the charming Lord Felix Mersey stowaway on a train to return their classmate Sidheag to her werewolf pack in Scotland. Because no one would have suspected what - and who - they would find aboard the suspiciously empty train.

The fourth and final book in a steampunk YA adventure series from Orbit's New York Times best-selling author of the Parasol Protectorate series.When a dastardly Pickleman plot comes to fruition, only Sophronia can save her friends, her school and all of London...but at what cost? Our proper young heroine puts her training and skills to the test in this highly anticipated conclusion of the rousing, intriguing and always polished New York Times best-selling Finishing School series!