I was happily listening to Marcus Roberts on my turntable (recommend), while re-reading Leigh Bardugo's brilliant heist adventure story Six of Crows (also recommend), when I made the grave mistake of looking at my phone (do not recommend) and realized that I neglected to send out audio conference details or book a room for a meeting with a vendor tomorrow (really don't recommend).

Ahhh... Monday... You jerk... Descending upon Sunday night like a wraith, stealing all the hard-won serenity collected over the weekend. Making me find my laptop, which I had hid rather effectively from myself in the back of my car, and encouraging all the swearing at said laptop because I forgot that I changed my password on Friday and I couldn't figure out why the dumb thing wouldn't let me log in. <sigh>

But now the meeting has conferencing details, and I have a conference room booked, and my machine is on... so, I might as well post something.

Competence by Gail Carriger (Custard Protocol, #3)!

I have a lot of love for Gail Carriger. She's written many great books: sassy adventures starring memorable characters, fantastically drôle dialogue, ugly parasols that double as weapons, mechanimals (as in mech-animals), and some of the most imaginable settings around. So good. She makes milliners into convincing evil geniuses and tweens into tea-drinking assassins-in-training. She named a character Channing Channing of the Chesterfield Channings, for gods sake. That's worth something.

So why is the Custard Protocol series so meh?

I can't even begin to account for all of the mixed feelings I have towards this series. The first book had promise. Alexa Tarrabotti's metanatural daughter is a chubby adventuress who captains a dirigible called The Spotted Custard. She's vexed by an angelic-looking French mechanic who gets up to all sorts of trouble. She runs with a fun crowd and drinks tons of tea. Those are my life goals.

Doesn't that sound like all I'd want in a series?

Well... ordinarily, yeah. But in the words of my husband whenever anyone makes a reference to the cinematic classic "Bring It On"

Gail... You know I have so much love for your French mechanics, but give poor Quesnel a chance. The poor guy--no matter what he does, no matter how witty he is, no matter how dimply he is... he's already going to be outdone by better French mechanic characters from series past, such as... I don't know... his own actual mother! As a child, as an adult, as an evil genius, as an adorable scamp, Genevieve LaFoux is the best French mechanic of all time. End of story. So why do it again?

Also, book two, as I may have mentioned before, was a complete disaster and I may have paid a hypnotist to help me forget it so that I might be able to give book three a proper chance. And we did. Kristina and I anxiously awaited the pre-order, and we cleared the deck when said book dropped.... and the verdict on book three?

It was annoying but not unreadable.

I did enjoy that it followed another character, the impeccably put together Spotted Custard purser, Primrose Tunstell. And I also enjoyed that it featured far more of her brother, the quirky navigator and all around social liability, Professor Percival Tunstell. The cat and the valet were great, as usual. I just didn't care much for the first half...

For example:

Repetitive repetition of super annoying internal struggle. Prim, do you want to have your face caressed by the face of female werecat (yeah, that's a thing) or not? Because it seems like you really want to have a female werecat face on your face...
Said werecat calling Prim "little one" over an over. So. Condescending. So. Annoying.
Complete lack of witty dialogue... like at all.
The first half of the book lacked any sort of plot.
Too much floating around and generally being attacked by airships that look like soup ladles
Boring philosophy club

You know what I did like? The group of beings they eventually decided to rescue were called "pishtacos." This reminded me of fish tacos, which are delicious and I enjoy very much. Oh, and I liked that they made Percy (which I may have mentioned three times already) wear a fez through the whole book. Fezes (what is the plural of fez anyway?!) are funny.

Kristina was especially disappointed in the end, where they announced they'll be headed back home for a super lame reason (which was only lame because it came out of nowhere and didn't let us be creepy voyeurs), but that didn't really bother me. Once Prim stopped being annoying, got freaky with the condescending werecat, and the crew found a thing worth doing, the book got quite a lot better. I'm still annoyed, but I'm not ready to give up... yet. I will pre-order book four and hope that they don't go back to following Rue and Quesnel. I will hope hard that this book follows the deviation set forth in book three and follows another character (Percy! Percy! Percy!!!) and that Percy ruins several social events and/or starts a war or something by just being himself.

I hope.