The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy by Mackenzi Lee

This book was one of my most anticipated releases this year. Ever since I read the first book (The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue) I couldn’t wait to return to the wonderful world of the Montague siblings once again. The first book was one of my favorite books of all time. It was just utterly amazing, unique and completely addictive, and I fell completely in love with the sassy, hilarious Monty and the sweet, darling Percy, as well as Felicity, Monty’s fierce and ambitious younger sister.

This time, the story was told from Felicity’s POV, and focused on her ambition to study medicine and her problems to be taken seriously as an intelligent woman and be admitted to a medical school. Just like in the first book though, adventure comes knocking and soon Felicity finds herself on a quest across Europe and on a dragon hunting expedition in the Atlantic that will bring her back to her childhood best friend, Johanna, who she hasn’t spoken to in years, and Sim, the girl with a secretive past. I liked the headstrong Felicity already in the first book and can certainly relate to her and how she’s not able to do what she really wants, as opposed to what society dictates she must do. So I was happy to get a chance to get to know her even better in this book, but I must confess that I really missed Monty’s POV. A lot of what made the first book so amazing and hilarious, was that it was told in Monty’s engaging, sassy voice. In the first book, Felicity felt like something of a Hermione Granger on speed, so I thought she’d be able to carry the story as well, but sadly not. With the story being told from Felicity’s POV this time, it lost that unique way of telling the story and made it less fun.
 
The story was also much slower this time. Especially the first part of the book, which dragged a lot, until the more adventurous part kicked in. It felt unnecessary that this book was over 500 pages, it would have been better without a hundred of them or so. Where The Gentleman’s Guide felt like a wild roller-coaster ride, this story at times felt too serious and straight forward. I get that some of that is due to the fact that the story is told by Felicity, who is a much more serious person than Monty, but it was still disappointing that the magic and the unique tone and humor from the first book was missing in this one.
 
But, overall, it was still a good book full of story twists and adventures, and strong women, friendship, love and pirates. And dragons! I loved that part of the book, it added some of the magic from the first one again. The best parts of the book were the ones that Monty and Percy were in. My heart melted every time and I had this goofy smile all over my face! So even though this book did not fully meet my expectations set by the previous book in the Montague series, I still really enjoyed parts of it very much.

Rating:
3 stars

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​Author info:
Mackenzi Lee