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A review by stefhyena
The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy by Mackenzi Lee
adventurous
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
I liked a lot of this but it leaned into a liberal capitalist expansionist politics of inevitability (who knows what is right and wrong but I am sick of not exploiting things) that was really gross...to portray the claims of Sybil Glass and the "pirates" (ie Africans on their own lands and waters) as equivalent might be "true to the time" but that's not a good excuse in a book that has dragons and other anachronisms like pirate tattoos.
So that passive racist thing annoyed me. I also felt that while Felicity's feeling of superiority and exceptionalism was rightly critiqued by Johanna (who in other ways was my least favourite character) and rightly portrayed as stemming from deep loneliness, she leans back into it in her letter to Callum at the end. WTF was that? Most women just want to be gaslit wives sorry that I am not like the other girls???? I hate that sort of exceptionalism (again liberal feminism, the sovereign individual).
The afterword defends the idea of feminist characters (which shouldn't really need defending) which is great. And yeah I gues people like Felicity are exceptional BECAUSE MOST WOMEN WERE CRUSHED IN THEIR HOPES AND DREAMS not because few women dreamed or most didn't want it enough. All the way through the book she says "you are Felicity Montagu" as if some people are just more worthy than others. I thought the unequal relationship between Sim and Felicity was problematic too. And portraying Sim as a potential "Traitor" for caring about her people and her indigenous heritage was just awful.
I can't get past that. I really enjoyed early in the book where literally all the men were on the spectrum between awful or just useless (the pansies as useless and the hetero men as awful). I thought it was over the top but making an interesting point...I feel like toward the end of the book it became too much about empire building selfish rich white people and I was not as into that.
So that passive racist thing annoyed me. I also felt that while Felicity's feeling of superiority and exceptionalism was rightly critiqued by Johanna (who in other ways was my least favourite character) and rightly portrayed as stemming from deep loneliness, she leans back into it in her letter to Callum at the end. WTF was that? Most women just want to be gaslit wives sorry that I am not like the other girls???? I hate that sort of exceptionalism (again liberal feminism, the sovereign individual).
The afterword defends the idea of feminist characters (which shouldn't really need defending) which is great. And yeah I gues people like Felicity are exceptional BECAUSE MOST WOMEN WERE CRUSHED IN THEIR HOPES AND DREAMS not because few women dreamed or most didn't want it enough. All the way through the book she says "you are Felicity Montagu" as if some people are just more worthy than others. I thought the unequal relationship between Sim and Felicity was problematic too. And portraying Sim as a potential "Traitor" for caring about her people and her indigenous heritage was just awful.
I can't get past that. I really enjoyed early in the book where literally all the men were on the spectrum between awful or just useless (the pansies as useless and the hetero men as awful). I thought it was over the top but making an interesting point...I feel like toward the end of the book it became too much about empire building selfish rich white people and I was not as into that.