Review: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
Mackenzi Lee
Release: June 27, 2017
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An unforgettable tale of two friends on their Grand Tour of 18th-century Europe who stumble upon a magical artifact that leads them from Paris to Venice in a dangerous manhunt, fighting pirates, highwaymen, and their feelings for each other along the way.

Henry “Monty” Montague was born and bred to be a gentleman, but he was never one to be tamed. The finest boarding schools in England and the constant disapproval of his father haven’t been able to curb any of his roguish passions—not for gambling halls, late nights spent with a bottle of spirits, or waking up in the arms of women or men.

But as Monty embarks on his grand tour of Europe, his quest for a life filled with pleasure and vice is in danger of coming to an end. Not only does his father expect him to take over the family’s estate upon his return, but Monty is also nursing an impossible crush on his best friend and traveling companion, Percy.

Still it isn’t in Monty’s nature to give up. Even with his younger sister, Felicity, in tow, he vows to make this yearlong escapade one last hedonistic hurrah and flirt with Percy from Paris to Rome. But when one of Monty’s reckless decisions turns their trip abroad into a harrowing manhunt that spans across Europe, it calls into question everything he knows, including his relationship with the boy he adores.

Witty, romantic, and intriguing at every turn, The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue is a sumptuous romp that explores the undeniably fine lines between friendship and love.

Review:
One of my favorite things in the world is to pick up a book and know immediately from page one that I'm going to love it and that it will soon have a spot on my favorites shelf. The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue was one of those books for me. I loved everything about it: the characters, the mystery, the romance, and the Grand Tour setting! But most of all, I loved the feeling of nostalgia it gave me. I'm not sure I can explain how much I absolutely adored this book without gushing but I'm going to try.

This book is pitched by the author as "the big gay road trip novel set in the 18th century you didn't know you needed!" which set the bar high and it was abso-bloody-lutely amazing! It's a coming of age story that kind of read like historical fanfiction and I mean that in the best way possible! This was the adventure novel of my heart given an actual physical form with words. There's pirates and highway men and tombs and alchemy and streaking at the palace of Versailles. The story started off fast and doesn't let up until the book is over.

As much as I loved the adventure, my favorite thing about this book was, without a doubt, the characters. I quickly fell head over heels for the main trio: Monty, Percy, and Felicity. Monty was seriously everything. He was the perfect combination of insufferable, charming, and oddly vulnerable. I loved him at his most sullen and reckless as much as I did at his most bisexually rakish. Percy is Monty's best friend and the unrequited love of his life. He is absolutely adorable and I love the two of them together. I ship it so hard, guys! So hard! I spent most of the book yelling at them to get it together and kiss already.

As much as I love those two, the character who stole the show was Felicity, Monty's sister. She's described as being bookish and boring but I found her anything but. She's snarky and intelligent and is totally the Hermione of the trio. She's the reason Monty and Percy didn't die at the side of the road. The whole time I was was reading I kept thinking that I just wanted a whole book about Felicity being herself and having adventures. AND WE'RE GETTING ONE NEXT YEAR! I just really loved her and the dynamic she has with Monty was amazing and so realistic. I loved watching their relationship change throughout the course of the book.

The Gentleman's Guide, at its heart, was a coming of age story. Each of our heroes go through their own journeys as they figure out who they are and who they want to be. The people we meet at the beginning are not the people we see at the end. And that character evolution was one of the best parts about this book. I also loved how the book respectfully addresses some serious issues.  It covers so many things like LGBTQIA+ relationships and sexuality in the 18th century, being biracial in a racist society, mental health, disability, abuse, PTSD, and the privilege and power having money provides. The whole thing was exceedingly well done without the novel losing any of its lightness and humor.

I loved it and tried to read it slowly because I didn't want it to end. I grew up reading a weird mixture of fantasy, adventure, and historical fiction novels and this book was my whole childhood condensed into 528 pages. It brought back all the hours I spent devouring the adventures of characters like Sir Percy Blakeney, the Robinson family, Allan Quartermain, Professor Challenger, Phileas Fogg and Jean Passepartout, the March sisters and a metric ton of Sunfire Romance heroines which is the highest praise I can give a historical fiction adventure novel. 

ARC provided by the publisher via Edelweiss.

    

  5 / 5 Stars!

Recommended for fans of:
Sorcery and Cecilia, or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia C. Wrede
Soulless by Gail Carriger
Mairelon the Magician by Patricia C. Wrede

Release Day Review: Flame in the Mist by Renee Ahdieh

Flame in the Mist
(Flame in the Mist #1)
Renee Ahdieh
Release: May 16, 2017
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ARC provided by the publisher via First to Read

The daughter of a prominent samurai, Mariko has long known her place—she may be an accomplished alchemist, whose cunning rivals that of her brother Kenshin, but because she is not a boy, her future has always been out of her hands. At just seventeen years old, Mariko is promised to Minamoto Raiden, the son of the emperor's favorite consort—a political marriage that will elevate her family's standing. But en route to the imperial city of Inako, Mariko narrowly escapes a bloody ambush by a dangerous gang of bandits known as the Black Clan, who she learns has been hired to kill her before she reaches the palace.

Dressed as a peasant boy, Mariko sets out to infiltrate the ranks of the Black Clan, determined to track down the person responsible for the target on her back. But she's quickly captured and taken to the Black Clan’s secret hideout, where she meets their leader, the rebel ronin Takeda Ranmaru, and his second-in-command, his best friend Okami. Still believing her to be a boy, Ranmaru and Okami eventually warm to Mariko, impressed by her intellect and ingenuity. As Mariko gets closer to the Black Clan, she uncovers a dark history of secrets, of betrayal and murder, which will force her to question everything she's ever known. 

Review:

As I write this, I'm nursing a major book hangover. It took me a while to get into Flame in the Mist, as is often the case with multi-POV stories, but once I did it was hard to put down. It reminds me of Rebel of the Sands, which was one of my favorite books last year. Both books feature characters pretending to be someone else, including girls dressed as boys, and a strong sense of place.

Mariko is an inventor and has always felt out of place in her traditional noble family. She's very much aware of how different her life would be if she were a boy, in part because she has a twin brother. Kenshin is a renowned samurai, while Mariko is being traded to the royal family for political capitol. When she pretends to be a boy in order to infiltrate the Black Clan, she's finally able to find her strength and assert her independence. I appreciate that Ahdieh includes another female who shows her that there is power in being a woman as well.

I love the way the magic is subtly introduced in this world. There are shapeshifters, alchemists, and sorcerers, but their magic is not the only thing that defines them. Even at the end of the book, we still don't know all the details about the magical characters' origins and their powers. I'm thinking they will be a bigger part of book two. And I'm so happy there will be a second book because Holy Cliffhanger, Batman!

I also want to mention that Flame in the Mist is not a Mulan retelling. It does take some inspiration from Mulan, but there's so much more to the story. I think to call it a retelling, which I've seen a lot of people do, is really selling it short. It is the story of a girl who finds herself by being someone else, but it's also one of court politics, family loyalties, and a Robin Hood-like group of Lost Boys.  And it's an enemies to lovers romance, my personal fave. I'm glad that I took the time to get to know these characters. Now I can't wait for book two!

Recommended for fans of: Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton

    

4  stars

Top 5 Wednesday: Favorite SciFi/Fantasy Covers

Top 5 Wednesday is a group of bloggers, booktubers and bookstagrammers posting on a common topic every (you guessed it) Wednesday. You can find the lists by searching #T5W or Top 5 Wednesday. And you can join the group on Goodreads if you want to participate.

This week's topic is:

Favorite SFF Cover Art

*Booktube SFF Awards Crossover Topic*

 

5. The Breath of Earth Series by Beth Cato

Cover Art by Gene Mollica (Illustrator) and Richard Aquan (Designer)

4. The Soulwood Series by Faith Hunter

Cover Art by Katie Anderson

3. The Chronicle of the Unhewen Throne Trilogy by Brian Staveley
Cover Art by Richard Anderson

2. The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater
Cover Art by Adam S. Doyle

1. The Shades of Magic Series by V. E. Schwab
Cover Art by Will Staehle

 and

What are your favorite covers?

Theme Thursdays: The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

This year we're going to try something new that we hope will help us tackle our TBR piles and keep us motivated to complete our #RockMyTBR challenges. We're starting a new feature called Theme Thursdays this year! Each month, we'll review books from our respective TBRs that fit a theme we choose at the beginning of the month. January's theme is MAGIC!

The Bear and the Nightingale
The Winternight Trilogy #1
Katherine Arden
Release: January 10, 2017
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At the edge of the Russian wilderness, winter lasts most of the year and the snowdrifts grow taller than houses. But Vasilisa doesn’t mind—she spends the winter nights huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse’s fairy tales. Above all, she loves the chilling story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon, who appears in the frigid night to claim unwary souls. Wise Russians fear him, her nurse says, and honor the spirits of house and yard and forest that protect their homes from evil.

After Vasilisa’s mother dies, her father goes to Moscow and brings home a new wife. Fiercely devout, city-bred, Vasilisa’s new stepmother forbids her family from honoring the household spirits. The family acquiesces, but Vasilisa is frightened, sensing that more hinges upon their rituals than anyone knows.

And indeed, crops begin to fail, evil creatures of the forest creep nearer, and misfortune stalks the village. All the while, Vasilisa’s stepmother grows ever harsher in her determination to groom her rebellious stepdaughter for either marriage or confinement in a convent.

As danger circles, Vasilisa must defy even the people she loves and call on dangerous gifts she has long concealed—this, in order to protect her family from a threat that seems to have stepped from her nurse’s most frightening tales.

Review:
I'm going to be honest here. The first half of this book is slow and full of worldbuilding. That doesn't mean it wasn't gloriously good but it took me a bit to get into it. I will say that I knew I was going to love the story as soon as I finished chapter three. The writing is gorgeous and atmospheric and reminded me of Robin McKinley's works which is one of the biggest compliments I can give a book. I loved that the story is full of Russian fairy tales! I was familiar with a few of them but not all of them. Reading this book, you can see that the author did her research and it made the story that much more amazing!

The story's main focus and character is Vasya, the youngest child of the minor nobleman, Pyotr Vladimirovich. She is a strange child who likes to spend all her days in the woods and is always getting into all sorts of mischief. This book isn't just the story of a girl with strange abilities, it's also about the rise of Christianity in Rus and how it starts pushing out the country's pagan beliefs. There are many households in Vasya's village who both pray to God and make offerings to the household spirits until a priest comes and tells them there is only God and no such thing as spirits.

Soon after that the village starts to suffer terrible winters that don't let up. Vasya starts to realize that the fairy tales her nurse told her growing up may not be simply fairy tales. When darkness descends on the village, Vasya may be the only one with the power to stop it.

This book is magical and Vasya is an unlikely heroine in the vein of Agnieszka in Naomi Novik's Uprooted and Aerin from Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown and I fell in love with her almost immediately! That love just got bigger as the book progressed and we watched her grow into a young woman. I'm pretty sure I can't quantify how much I ended up loving her by the end of the book. She's like the heroines of my childhood reading and it made my reading experience even more lovely! I loved that Vasya continues to make offerings to the household spirits and befriends them even though it goes against her Stepmother's views of them being demons.

The overall storyline of the book is very subtle and the story feels more like historical fiction than fantasy in places. But there comes a point about halfway through the book where things start to pick up and the subtle plot that had been laid in the first part comes to light and the conflict becomes noticeable. IT WAS SO WELL DONE! I'm amazed at how everything came together. This is one of those books that I'll be able to reread over and over again and pick up new details every time. Also, the number of Russian fairy tales referenced in this book was amazing and I'm pretty sure I missed a bunch. I need more books that revolve around Russian folklore in my life!

Not only did I fall in love with the story and the atmosphere of this book, but I fell in love with so many of the characters besides Vasya. I want more of them! The book ends on a slight cliffhanger that will make you want for the next book in this series ASAP. This book is definitely going to be one of my favorites of the year which makes Katherine Arden a debut author you don't want to miss! She has gained a place on my auto-buy list after just one book if that tells you how much I loved this story.

Recommended for fans of:
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley
The Star-Touched Queen by Roshani Chokshi

ARC provided by the publisher via Netgalley.

   

  4 / 5 Stars