Girl Genius: Agatha Heterodyne and the Beetleburg Clank by Phil and Kaja Foglio

[meganbmoore]

In an Industrial Revolution where certain people with "the spark" are able to tamper with the laws of ohysics, Agatha Clay(revealed by the mere title of the book to be connected to the Heterodynes, a family of famous adventurers) is a poor, clumsy student at Transylvania Polygnostic University, with little hope of success.  In one morning, she gets disoriented by an electrical disturbance, mugged(losing a Verra Verra Valuable locket in the process) is late for class, yelled at, and ordered to clean the lab before the Verra Verra Important Baron Wulfenbach arrives.

At about the point Baron Wulfenbach arrives with his arrogant, highly-scientifically-trained son, Gilgamesh("Gilgamesh Wulfenbach?" my brain goes when he arrives, "Agatha's love interest is named Gilgamesh Wulfenbach?  Oy vey...") and flunkies for an inspection and it's revealed that a Verra Verra Important project was nothing more than a test to see if Gilgamesh was worth keeping(he's apparently considered to be expendable) I started losing track of the plot.  Oh, sure, the plot was there, but suddenly there were allt hese insanely fun things like closets exploding and Gilgamesh with a fishbowl and bombs and swatting bombs with a wrench and objections to accidentally killing the guy who who threw the bomb at you(and your future girlfriend!) when you swatted the bomb and secret identities and mysterious illnesses and rampaging machines called clanks and giant machine guns and sorts of other things I'm forgetting and this run-on sentence has reached absurdity, but now you know what it's like to read it.  And OH HAI! Someone has the spark and you only get one guess who.

I think I love it and its zany insanity.  I quite like Agatha and her attempts to be pragmatic despite the insanity and and her clutziness, and Gil is so uptight and serious and potentially obsessive and highstrung that I want to pat him on the head.  He is also already blatantly smitten with Agatha(who, unfortunately for him, is currently a touch peeved over the whole "bomb" thing) yet amazingly oblivious about it that I detect much laughter on my part over that.  I also detect much wacky and over the top angst on the horizon.