Review: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was never planning on reading this, but Katytastic gave the audiobook praise so I requested for my library to get a copy. A few months passed, and to my surprise my library actually listened to me (and some others) for once and my audiobook journey with this book began.

First of all: This is by far NOT among the best audiobooks I've listened to. (If you don't care about the audiobook, skip down to the next paragraph.) This is not a bad audiobook, if anything, this is just the standard of how all audiobooks should be. Granted, they're NOT all this quality--some audiobook voiceover artists just really need to quit their jobs. But if you want truly well-read and well-produced (and well-written) audiobooks, look no further than Beauty Queens narrated by Libba Bray and Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock narrated by Noah Galvin.

Now onto the actual book. How a man like Henry Montague Sr. could possibly father such incredibly bratty children as Monty and Felicity is lost on me. I usually don't mind--and actually take a liking to--bratty/snotty characters, but Monty is the most insufferable, ignorant, overprivileged, alcoholic prick I've ever read, and this is what kept me from truly enjoying myself for the great majority of this book. Yeah yeah it's there for character development and whatnot, but even with that very much on my mind whilst reading, it didn't stop Monty from flabbergasting me with his insane vanity every time he opened his mouth. (view spoiler)[Him getting his face and ear burnt and blown up didn't do anything for me. Cool, he's like, "nicer" now, but that didn't really do anything to undo his extreme unpleasantness from the rest of the book. (hide spoiler)] How in the world Percy puts up with him is also way beyond my realm of comprehension. (view spoiler)[Monty himself also addresses this and Percy replies with something along the lines of being able to put up with him because he loves him, but like, WHAT!? How could he ever love Monty in the first place?!?!? There can only be so much shit a person can take before they're like "Well, you know, this guy is actually a huge dickwad, maybe I should stop enabling him to be this way and leave him because this behaviour and attitude and overall way of living is just not the way that a human is supposed to function." Like, after that you just CANNOT keep loving someone! The love cannot be that strong, not towards such a foul human! It should have dissipated a long time ago! Percy what the fuck!? (hide spoiler)]

But you know what, I still gave this book 3 out of 5 stars. That's because even with Monty's insufferable-ness, the book was able to retain 3 stars worth of entertainment value. I went into this expecting some 18th century slightly gay slice of life reading listening, but it ended up being an 18th century very gay adventure story. That threw me off, I'm not going to lie. Literally from (what I would imagine to be) the first page it hit me with a blast of (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ GAY ✧ﾟ･: *ヽ(◕ヮ◕ヽ) and I knew that at least that part of my initial assumption was wrong. If you want to know how gay it is, click here: (view spoiler)[There are a couple gay makeout scenes that almost turn to sex but not quite. Also a lot of gay thoughts. But I'm not saying exactly who these take place with. (hide spoiler)] But as with any male gay romance written by a woman I can't help but feel like this is just something the author wrote to please herself and the other trash ladies out there who fetishize malexmale romance. (view spoiler)[Especially because of how many times the author teased sex and even a kiss and then just left us waiting with our dicks out. (hide spoiler)] This isn't a true gay romance, it's just fujoshi bait for a Western audience. Geh.

The fact that Monty's internal monologue--cringey as it was--still had some sense of charm and charisma to it, and that this turned out to be an adventure story, made this book an actually compelling read. I listened to it on the commute to and from school (a total of 2-ish hours per day) and it made the journey quite bearable. Once, I even found myself yearning to continue listening to it while I was at home. The story was enjoyable to listen to while bored on the train, but otherwise, looking back, it isn't something that I really care about all that much. There were a lot of things that, considering the time period, I found to be too unrealistic, and then some other things that I found just generally unrealistic. (view spoiler)[Like Monty not getting disowned and thrown onto the street for sending love letters to a boy. Like, WE know that HIS DAD knows that he's gay, so it doesn't make sense how he didn't get thrown out. People in the MODERN age still get thrown out for sucking the wrong dick, so how did Monty not? Especially considering how strict his dad is. I also don't get why Percy wasn't thrown out for harbouring the devil's curse or whatever they called epilepsy. And I don't understand why Pascal (the apothecary) was so nice and helped them. First of all, Monty was a giant dickhead to him (like always), and second of all Pascal's livelihood got destroyed and his life threatened. I thought it might get explained later, like that Pascal secretly knew them or something, but it didn't. That was much too much of a deus ex machina for me, sorry. (hide spoiler)]

Overall, with the good and the bad, I feel that 3 stars represents my feelings on this story satisfactorily enough. I’m not really interesting in reading the next book in this series.

View all my reviews