Lessons in Etiquette

By: Christopher G. Nuttall

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

Length: 13 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's Summary

After completing her first year of learning magic at Whitehall School, Emily accepts an invitation from Princess Alassa to accompany her on her progress back to her home country of Zangaria, where the princess may meet her future husband. Alassa, who was a spoiled brat before she met Emily, wants to show off her friend - and impress potential suitors.

For Emily, it is a chance to relax and explore a world very different to Earth, meet new people and come to terms with her reputation in the Nameless World. After her defeat of Shadye, everyone wants to know her, to talk with her, to kill her or to marry her. For Emily, hardly a social butterfly, the experience is disconcerting. She was never seriously courted before, not on Earth.

And yet, as she sees more of the countries surrounding Whitehall, she feels more and more out of place. The locals come from a very different culture, one that is often strange and horrifying to her eyes. Even her friends seem different people in their homes.

But dark forces are at work, plotting to capture the princess, take power in Zangaria, and undo all of Emily's work. As all hell breaks loose, Emily may be all that stands between Zangaria and a return to the dark ages of brute force that threatened to lay the kingdom low once before. And if she fails, her friends will be just the first victims of a war that will rip the Allied Lands apart.

©2014 Christopher G. Nuttall (P)2016 Podium Publishing

A learning experience

To start, before writing this, I read through Gordian Knot so I'm pretty involved in the series and like a lot of what Nuttell does. I've read and listened to a lot of Nuttall's stuff. He come up with some REALLY awesome plot lines but sometimes his writing come off as super biased. Maybe that is because he is from Scotland and this Yank just doesn't get his mindset sometimes.

But to me, these books have been a neat story line with a bad execution. In example I find Emily's inner dialog so very annoying. Always talking about how she "made" the princess a good person. Always going on about how backwards the world is and comparing it to Earth. For someone who supposedly doesn't miss earth, she complains a lot. She is so obsessive about how awesome she is, how insecure she is, how traumatized she is by her past... it sometime make me want to reach through the dimensions and bitch slap her.

Maybe Nuttell wants the reader to find Emily extremely annoyed by her. A very insecure girl, who also thinks she is right about everything. Just wow, sit back and think about that for a moment....

Moment over. So I found a number of these books a staggered attempt at getting into a young female mindset. Maybe that is actually how teenage girls are, and I'm super disconnected, but if so... sorry girls, get over yourselves.

As you read/listen further he (or she) will get better, but not by much. I love a strong female lead, but I think Emily is that only part of the time, the rest of the time she is waffling is a world where she needs to nut up or shut up.

Also the learning curve in the books has been odd. she learned SOOOO much much magic in her first year or two. Over the next number of years after she nickel and dined her way through school. After both Past Tense and Sergant's Apprentice I thought, "Finally, let the bad ass out!" but nope... she continues to waffle.

So, a brave attempt to Nuttell to take on the mind of a teenage girl, but sometime I have wished the necromancer's would turn her into their sock puppet to stop her whining.

3 people found this helpful

Great series!!!! Book2 better than first!!!!!!

5 stars series!!!! A must read/ listen, can't wait to listen to the rest of the books!

3 people found this helpful

Exciting

A nice magical world with interesting intriguing plot twist mixed with integumentary characters
New World meet old world

2 people found this helpful

I got through the whole thing

struggled to get through. didn't really care for narration or story, but I don't really care for so much discussion about sexism in my books over and over and over again.

2 people found this helpful

decent series

This book seemed slow in areas. There were many repeated phrases or terms within the same paragraph and chapters (a pet peeve, makes my eyes twitch).

3 people found this helpful

mediocre at best.

The author has great ideas but fails to put it into words. The writing style lacks any creativity. For example; If you bought this book on Kindle and did a word search for "Emily flushed" you would get over a hundred hits. He has no other description for his main character getting embarrassed!
The narrator is rather overrated. She, just like the characters she plays, is a mediocre mess. She can only do two voices; the highborn snobby lady voice and the confused lowborn servant. Oh, and she does the exact same voice for all men! Overall she's kinda annoying.
To recap.
This book is trying to be a Harry Potter set in a medieval world. It's wants to be a great classic fantasy hero story. It almost is! Yet the author struggles constantly with pacing, narrative and character development. It's simply mediocre and forgettable which is unfortunate considering the story's potential.
To end on a positive note... This is an improvement, written wise, over the first installment. And I will be buying the next book in the series because I hope he will continue to improve.

1 person found this helpful

A bit repetitive.

I enjoyed the overall story. I do wish there was less repeating things multiple times when they had already been said in the book.

Liked it very much

If you like Harry Potter, I think you will enjoy it, I mean it's not exactly like Harry Potter but very similar.

Very good

The second book is amazing. I enjoy each minute, because remind me a version to Game of Throbes. Here we have many realms, a lot of intrigue, magic and the problem of how easy the the information can be distorted by the troubadours or "newspapers". Emily need to So, Emly must learn to deal with the fame that precedes her in every kingdom she and Alassa visit, and find their place in this magical world. To complicate matters, a plot is being architected around them and resolving the situation results in something unexpected and with consequences that have spread over the long term.
the book is very good. It's really worth it

"It's okay."

The characters aren't developed well, at all, considering it's book two already.

The background plot isn't bad, hence the two stars, but it's not great. And I'm not picky with my literature.

The bad part of this series is the characters.

Take the main character, there most fleshed out character in the series, as an example. You don't know anything about them except that they're basically even more useless than Harry Potter, who was very useless, and that they had a crappy background. I had read in the reviews that what people thought made the main character interesting was her knowledge of history. She knows NOTHING about history aside from a few random facts most people would gleam from a gameshow.

Sure, that's fine. But then, in the middle of a fight scene, for some reason the author feels that's a good time to inject some moral reasoning as to why the main character is too stupid to defend herself. "Oh, look, they're attempting to kill me. Is it really okay for me to kill someone? Derpy derp killing people is wrong. Let me talk about that for a few stupid lines, breaking up the action in the book for no reason, even though the main character didn't go out looking for innocent babies to kill in their sleep, better show how 'morally thoughtful' she is..." If the main character had any remote sense of morality, she's would have thought of this nonsense before getting into a fight. You know, like everyone else in the known world.

And they do it all the time. Not once, not twice, constantly. Everyone I know has had a more firm sense of morality from the time they were 10.

Gets annoying fast. Gonna try other series before continuing this one.

great

loved the book more action than the last one but as I am a bloke not to keen on the princess story but again well read and am downloading next one now keep writing

3 people found this helpful

Author needs to learn write

As with book 1 this is a first person story written in 3rd person, which makes Emily's ramblings annoying. Emily's musings are constantly running back on themselves.

And at the beginning she says that the Princess is older than her yet says she's 17, which is Emily's age. Although, I thought that Emily was younger than that as I don't think the first book ever mentioned age.

The whole world building around marriage as nothing more than a mating ritual is off putting and even Emily never mentions marriage for love. Emily should have said to Jade that he was shite at trying to woo a girl and had to work for it with dates and all that crap and dating before he even considered asking her anything like it.

And the final boss had no actual foreshadowing. They just jumped out of nowhere and turned out to be crazy and stupid. At least leave clues to the big bad rather than just picking someone at random.

I like the overall plots, but too much of the story is Emily's thought, and re-thoughts about the same things constantly. It's just wasteful padding. I can tell that a lot of it is added after the story has been finished to pad it out as no one should ramble a 3rd person story between a conversation as that can make the reader forget what she's answering after a long winded mind-ramble.

Also, Emily is very anti-male. That was made clear in book 1. And even mentioned in this book. I would have expected some lesbian tendancies if she was to think about a lover.

Though, one of the worst things are some of the names, such as Jade? For a boy?

And the constant reminders of her previous adventure was completely unnecessary. And mocking Mary-Sues when Emily should be number 1 of Forbes top 10 list of Mary-Sues, and trying to pretend she's not.

Also, everything just moved much too fast. All her inventions and the fall of guilds. But I can overlook that.

I'm still interested. I don't mind a Mary-Sue with a good story when it's cheap, even when so full of filler. And this book was only £2.99 with the £0.99 Kindle book and book 3 is only £2.99 with the £1.49 Kindle book, so cheaper than a Credit.

2 people found this helpful

Book 2 in a wonderful series!

I'm a harry potter fan and this series gives me life! If you aren't quite convinced... stick with it!!

1 person found this helpful

I just realized...

People do a lot of realizing stuff in this book, as well as the first one. Does the author not have a thesaurus? "Realized" is the most used word in this series so far as I can tell, kind of annoying..