Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue Review

Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee is a young adult historical fiction novel. It follows Henry (Monty), his sister Felicity and his childhood friend Percy as they set out on their “Grand Tour” of Europe, but things invariably go off course.

This book gets 2 out of 5 stars. It was pretty blah. The plot was kind of interesting, but like every bad thing that could happen did. Furthermore, many of the plot events were instigated by stupid and bad choices on the main character’s part. Nor was I really impressed by the conflict of the story. As a predominantly historical work I would have preferred the conflict to be more realistic than fantastical.

Another let down was that I didn’t like any of the characters. They were not just flawed but really just unlikeable people. Each of the three main characters expresses one way society of the time judged and put down people (homosexual man, education minded female, and half black epileptic). Those are not small topics or unimportant topics, but Lee doesn’t leave us with a sense of hope in the knowledge that things have changed over time (less discrimination all the way around) and in trying to address all of them she is stretched thin (no opportunity to go into real depth into any of them). At the end of the book in an author’s note she does give a little extra info on each of those topics in the context of that time, but that just isn’t enough. I would have preferred her choosing one topic to really delve into in novel form or make it a series and do one topic per book.

Furthermore, she also seems to try and excuse Monty’s terrible behavior and choices with his past (which is a very sad thing and what he went through is in no way okay), but I think at 18 years old a person needs to take responsibility for their own choices and actions. He was just completely driven by selfishness and that didn’t change through the book. None of the characters really grew through the story.   

There was obviously a lot of behavior going on in this book that was clearly not okay: getting drunk all the time, badmouthing and cursing, stealing, characters who were ready to have sex with practically anyone, stealing etc. The sexual content got a bit heavy and uncomfortable in three places, but not full on pornographic.

Overall, it was quite the let down after all the hype it has been getting. The only things really going for it is that it does bring up important issues about the time and the writing style is easy and quick to read. But that doesn’t make it a good book.