And oddly enough, even though Carriger’s Victorian society is set in an alternate history, it still feels more authentic to the time period, in both social and costume detail. It’s like the Mummy movies if you took out the mummy.

I was constantly comparing them as I read Crocodile on the Sandbank, and once you’ve read Victorian deliciousness in a world of vampires, werewolves, dirigibles and automatons, plain old crumbling Egyptian ruins feel, well, a tad dull. ( The Crocodile on the Sandbank in the first installment in that voluminous series from Elizabeth Peters – it spans 20 books and three decades.) There are undeniably qualities shared by Carriger’s leading lady, Alexia Tarabotti, and Amelia Peabody: both ladies are frank spinsters with a keen sense of irony both are unabashedly (and a tad pompously) intellectual, and both like to poke people with a parasol if they prove too troublesome.Īlright, I admit it – reading Gail Carriger first has given me an unavoidable bias towards the Parasol Protectorate. When Gail Carriger’s Soulless first came out, I heard the Amelia Peabody series mentioned frequently as a series similar in spirit and tone. The two become fast friends and travel on together, encountering mysteries, missing mummies, and Radcliffe Emerson, a dashing and opinionated archaeologist who doesn’t need a woman’s help - or so he thinks. On her way to Egypt, Amelia encounters a young woman named Evelyn Barton-Forbes. At thirty-two, strong-willed Amelia Peabody, a self-proclaimed spinster, decides to use her ample inheritance to indulge her passion, Egyptology. Set in 1884, this is the first installment in what has become a beloved bestselling series.

Elizabeth peters crocodile