The Nitty Gritty: Lady Prudence Alessandra Maccon Akeldama is all grown up and ready for adventure. As the only, to date, metanatural in the world its up to her to cause as much trouble as she can while she can. This time she is given her very own dirigible and an assignment to negotiate a tea treaty with interested parties in India for her Dama.
All is not as it seems for the crew of The Spotted Custard as they float into port in Bombay. For one a mysterious cat seems to be on their tail (pun included) and said cat keeps asking Rue about her mother and two the local werewolf pack is acting funny and a Brigadier's wife is missing, along with Dama's tea. Its up to the crew of The Spotted Custard sort everything out before new gets back to England that Rue entertained a certain military gentlemen without a chaperon.
Opening Line: "Lady Prudence Alessandra Maccon Akeldama was enjoying her evening exceedingly."
The Good: I am a huge, huge fan of Gail's and a bigger fan of her Parasol Protectorate series. I mean who doesn't love a bossy woman with a penchant for getting into sticky situations? Well I do. I tore through the entire series in a manner of days and was saddened when I got to the end and found out there wouldn't be anymore. I was overjoyed when Gail announced that she was returning to the sundowner world and giving use a new cast of characters for our troubles.
The brood of all the characters we grew to love in the Parasol Protectorate are all present and accounted for in the Custard Protocol. Its interesting to see that Primrose and Prudence became friends, better friends that Ivy and Alexia every were. For the simple fact that Prim and Rue are totally honest with each other and hold each other in the strictest of confidences. I wished Alexia and Ivy could have been that close. Ivy had a lot more to offer than people gave her credit for. Though its nice to see Prim getting a better spotlight and role than her mother got.
I am really enjoying the new characters in this tail. Especially Spoo. We often get this image of Victorian of England that tells us women were objects, pretty things to be bartered for money, position and or crown. Its nice to get these glimpse into a society that did have places for women that fell outside of societal norms. Sure society was still rigid and close minded but now we know that there were women who bucked tradition. I have a feeling Spoo is going to move out of the secondary character realm into a major character and I am all for it.
The Bad: I still really don't have a sense of Rue's personality. It seems to be a combination of several characters. Now on occasion in the novel Rue pulls on the personality of others as a means of infiltration, she is the daughter of the Prince of Spies after all, but even after she removed them I still don't know about Rue. The rest of the characters are laid out perfectly and precisely. I can tell you all about Prim, Percy and Quesnel and even Spoo, but for the life of me I can't figure out Rue.
Its almost as if Carriger is recreating Alexia because she got great feedback on this character. For me Rue is just a younger version of Alexia. We met Alexia when she was 26 and we meet Rue when she is 20. So I think Carriger just rolled back the clock for Rue. She doesn't have a firm footing.
I hate the relationship Rue has with her mother. I didn't think Alexia was going to suddenly turn sappy and become the mother of the year, but at the end of the Parasol Protectorate she did have a maternal connection with Prudence, but in this new series its almost as if Alexia and Conal abandoned their child into the sole care of Dama, as he is now called. Oh and can I mention the fact that I hate that Lord Akeldama, in all his dandy finery has been reduced to the ill fitting moniker, Dama. I cringe every time I read it. I just think it was forced tension that we didn't need. We already had that. Three people, two the blood parents, and one the adopted vampire parent, are trying to raise one child. That has tension slapped all over it. We didn't need the cliched bad parent relationship. I think it does a disservice to Alexia and especially Conal who was too excited over having a child. Now its possible that with this being the first book in the series Carriger wanted to firmly cement this as its own stand alone series and she needed to distance Rue from Alexia, but I think there were other ways this could have been accomplished.
For someone raised by Dama with Alexia and Conal as parents Rue is painfully naive. Almost to the point of stupidity. Rue seems to just be getting by on the sheer force of a borrow personality.
My Hope for the Series: I hope that Carriger can cement Rue's personality a little more. If she can then this series is sure to overtake the Parasol Protectorate and firmly place Carriger in the upper echelons of the fantasy genre right along side Butcher and Lackey and Riodan.
