Agatha and the Voice of the Castle (Girl Genius #3) by Phil & Kaja Foglio

After many adventures, Agatha has returned to the stronghold of her ancestors, Mechanicsburg, where generations of Heterodynes terrorised the continent. For many long years the people of Mechanicsburg have waited for a Heterodyne heir to return – a town full of minions just waiting for the Master to lead them again

But first she must prove herself in the Castle.  Sentiment, terrifying and immensely powerful structure, terribly damaged for years – few people survive who step within.

To complicate matters there’s a second claimant to her title – and it doesn’t help that Klaus, the Empreror, is convinced she is the Other, a terrible force that could tear his empire apart.

When reviewing books it is always important to remember that there are a lot of different tastes out there. I will look at goodreads and see people who loved books I loathes or hated books I adored, been a little bemused but then shrugged because taste is a weird and wonderful varied thing. I remember this because I try to be mature and sensible

Well, I’m throwing that out the window. If you do not love this book clearly there is something terribly wrong with you, I suspect you may not have a soul. Yes I call soullessness!

It is impossible for me to read more than a chapter of this book without a great big silly grin on my face. I think my face may actually be stuck like that. It’s the same grin from reading the previous two books – this series is just so much immense fun!

I love the sparks. I love these glorious evil geniuses with their brilliant mad science and whacky and terrifying creations! I love how zany and weird and wonderful it is. I love how much it made me laugh out loud over and over again as they do so many things, FOR SCIENCE! Including making exploding coffee THAT WAS PERFECT!

I love how so many of the characters are gloriously evil, and it just works in the most amazing way

I love the Jaegers, they’re immense fun, they’re evil and they’re hilarious and I want one. My only sadness is they don’t appear nearly enough in this book

I love the Castle, the product of generations of devilishly evil Heterodyne Spark masterminds who have designed it and increased it over the centuries to be a font of gleeful evil. I love how Agatha with her morality (occasionally overcome by her SCIENCE) tries to work surrounded by people and minions who are the very height of evil.

Agatha and the Clockwork Princess (Girl Genius #2) by Phil & Kaja Foglio

 Agatha and Krosp have made their escape from the airship city and are now trying to work their way towards Mechanicsburg, the home of the Heterodynes. Except their airship crashes, leaving them stranded in the Wasteland, where the abominations from a thousand eccentric Sparks roam unchecked. It’s a daunting task to face alone

Luckily she doesn’t have to, after winning the trust of a travelling show full of truly excellent eccentrics and managing to duck the Baron and his minions. But it’s far from a simple trip to Machanicsburg

Because Agatha isn’t just the daughter of Bill Heterodyne, but also of the evil and devious Lucrezia Mongfish whose schemes were far further reaching and far more evil than anyone ever imagined. Worse, even though she’s long dead, she left plans for her daughter, plans for her return from the dead and the resumption of her dark dreams empire.

This is a difficult review to write. Whenever I sit down to write a review, I want to be original, I want to say something new and interesting about the book. But this book is a sequel to the already awesome Agatha and the Airship City and I’m in the difficult position of wanting to say “just like the first book.”  Which is a rather limited review.

But it’s also accurate. This book is still immensely fun. It’s immensely whacky. It has an excellent, wonderful world with all the immense weirdness that a full continent of eccentric, weird science can produce.  We have strange constructs, we have clanks in all their various forms, technology that strains the very limits of imagination and wonder. Everything that made the last book so amazingly fun, so weird, so wonderful and, ultimately, so very different from what I’ve seen before is present in this book as well

The one thing I will say is that this book has a slight shift in style, balance and theme from the first book. The first book was zany, fun, random and chaotic. It’s gloriously cheesy, immensely funny, frequently silly and with vast amounts of joy and fun as we’re introduced to this glorious world, grinning all the time. Yet, at the same time it had an underlying sense of vast forces hanging the balance with the potential for battles that could consume Europa coupled with some potential for heavy emotional moments.

And then we hit this book and those epic forces have stepped up. We have Lucrezia Mongfish and the Other with their terrible machinations that could bring down the empire and enslave the continent. We have Agatha very personal involved in this conflict, fighting desperately to stop Lucrezia, despite her very intimate connection with her. This is a battle where people are dying, it’s a battle where many more lives are at stake. There is loss and grief and real risk, not Othar-style silly, fun non-risk but actual dark, steely risk.

We also have some very compelling relationships – Agatha and Lars was fun and light, but with a heavy undertone and a powerful ending. Agatha and Zeetha form a very strong and powerful friendship. These relationships gave us a cast of characters to care about – not just a few main characters and lots of very fun background ones. This gave us people we could worry over, people who could be lost and be a grievous loss – and they were. Even Wolfgang’s fear and grief for Agatha are powerful, well conveyed and add to the changing focus of the book. Even the resounding tragedy of the Clockwork Princess herself was far darker than I imagined I’d see in this series.

There was a darker edge to this book, the dark emotion, the grief, the anger, the desperation , the potential for loss and the epic scale of the Other and its forces added an edge that wasn’t there in the first book. This book had more depth to it, meaning it was still a fun read, but it was less of a whacky read. It had substance and heavy flesh on the bones beyond humour, randomness and this amazingly impossibly wonderful world with all the machinations of the eccentric sparks, but in doing so it made the book less light, less fluffy. I won’t say it was a dramatic shift in content so much as emphasis – the rampaging clanks and monsters and cruel experiments are the same as in the first book – but while they were funny and silly then, seeing the direct aftermaths and being directly caught among them shows just how dark they can be (and how dark any Spark can easily become – as we see with Wolfgang almost turning on Ardsley).

Agatha and the Airship City (Girl Genius #1) by Phil & Kaja Foglio

 Agatha leads a quiet, but frustrating life as a lab assistant, working for the brilliant, but eccentric Spark that runs her town, her dreams tortured by inspiration she could never quite reach. In the past, most of Europa was a patchwork of small kingdoms controlled or supported by Spark scientists and their armies of monsters, machines or combinations of both – but much of that changed when the Baron created his empire, absorbing the little kingdoms.

And the day came when Agatha’s town went from being a nominal, self-governing part of the empire to being fully under the Baron’s control. In the take over, Agatha found herself moved from her home to the Baron’s own floating castle. There she sees ever more of the Baron’s forces and the eccentric creations of Sparks across the continent – as well as develop some contact with the Baron’s son, Gil

But she also learns far more about her past, her talents and her past frustrations, opening up vats new possibilities but also putting her in considerable danger, and demand.

I’ve started reading a lot of Steampunk because there’s so much I love about it – the aesthetic, the slightly whacky technology, the glorious stylishness of it, the fun, proper and quirky characters, the wonderful combination of completely out there concepts mixed with Victorian sensibilities; it’s immense fun, it’s beautiful and it is incredibly imaginative and creative.

And on those grounds Girl Genius: Agatha H and the Airship City is the very epitome of Steampunk. But not just Steampunk – that whole genre of over the top adventure novels is perfectly included and lampooned in this book. The hero with his contrived, dramatic language and over the top heroics, who never ever dies and sees everything in clichés! The evil geniuses and their completely out of their mind nefarious schemes! The plucky girl side-kick (I wrote a hundred of my favourite lines from this book and stopped because I was quoting nearly the entire book. But when Othar suggests that Agatha set him free as his ‘Spunky girl sidekick’ her response, as someone who has been round Sparks all her life just has to be quoted:

“I’d rather not end up being the Easily Duped Minion Who Sets the Insanely Dangerous Experiment free. Or the Hostage Who Ensures the Smooth-Talking Villain’s escape.”

“Ah…”

“I don’t have any proof that you really are Othar Tryggvassen, or that you’re really human.”

“Err”

“This Girl Sidekick job doesn’t call for a lot of smarts does it?”

Seriously I have a separate book of quotes I wanted to sue for the review because there were so many awesome exchanges like this. The Baron who is effortlessly and awesomely competent and evil and sets things up to constantly test himself and his son (poor Gil. Who also keeps getting flack from Agatha and everyone else over someone he killed, despite his constant protest “he threw a bomb at me!”) including taking a fight with the intrepid hero into a neighbouring room because they’d destroyed everything interesting in his lab. He’s just one of several characters I love – the evil baron, the long suffering heir-in-training and possible love interest, Gil and definitely the strangely dangerous creatures, the Jagermonsters. In fact, when compiling quotes? I could have confined myself entirely to what the Jagermonsters said or did and still be creased with laughter.