Lessons in Etiquette

Schooled in Magic, Book 2

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.

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

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

Exciting

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

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.

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.

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).

Well written and preformed

Very enjoyable and addictive story, I recommend this series to anyone who enjoys a good listen.

love it

I love this series! I've re-read or listened to this series multiple times. It's got magic, other worlds, and lots of personality building/growth.

Wonderful sequel to Schooled in Magic

Wonderfully crafted and a much welcome sequel to Schooled in Magic. I gave it four stars instead of five only because I was not as obsessively absorbed in it and I try to be a little stingy with five stars (though I re-read a lot of favorite books so still have plenty out there). I look forward to the return to Whitehall, though, in book three. I applaud the marvelous author, Christopher G. Nuttall. I feel as though I have discovered another Diana Wynne Jones, Mercedes Lackey, or Lois McMaster Bujold. That is a huge complement to the author. I have re-listened recently, and this story does an excellent job of showing how Emily is changing the world, and developing some key relationships...with Alyssa, Barb and others.

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.

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.

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

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!!

Again Brilliant

Fantastic novel, really like podium publishing, really good novels and authors.
Brilliant continuing story, well done and thankyou.

Hard to put down

Loved can't wait for next one I hope she gets to oread the spell book she got in book one

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..