Have you read Mackenzi Lee’s The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue? If not, stop reading this review and go read that. This is the sequel, and both books are utterly delightful and disarming. This book is the second in The Montague Siblings series (or duology? there are only two of them) and the story belongs to Felicity, the more sensible and academic of the two. Gentleman’s Guide made it clear that Felicity has more interest in science and medicine than domesticity and society and in her […]
Mostly, this book just did not work for me
2.5 stars Henry “Monty” Montague is a young bisexual lord sent off on a grand tour of Europe, accompanied by his best friend, Percy (who Monty has a massive crush on) and Felicity, Monty’s younger sister. For the first part of their journey, they are accompanied by an elderly tutor, but once they leave Paris, hijinks really ensue due to very poor decisions made on Monty’s part and soon the three young people are left to fend for themselves, on a crazy adventure through much […]
In which I am moderately cross
All right. Five books into the Outlander series, I know what to expect. Jamie and Claire. Roger and Bree. Lots of ludicrousness, lots of rudimentary surgeries, and lots of “Wait, is anything actually happening? IS THIS ABOUT ANYTHING?” In The Fiery Cross, in particular, you get a wedding day that is, I don’t know, 300 pages? Overall, I found this book to be more trying than its predecessors, but the charm and charisma of the lead characters — Jamie and Claire, I mean, since I […]
Book of Ages by Jill Lepore
Book of Ages was a 2013 National Book Award finalist in the non-fiction category. Historian Jill Lepore pieces together the life of Ben Franklin’s sister Jane and in doing so not only reveals the life of a fascinating “ordinary” 18th-century woman who happened to be the beloved little sister of a Founding Father, but also demonstrates her own prodigious skills as an historian. Lepore’s work is specifically about Jane but more broadly about history and historians, biography and novels, and determining whose lives are worth […]