sparklemaia 's review for:

The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks by Mackenzi Lee

3.0

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Pirates, a possibly cursed family heirloom, ass tattoos, the most polite mutiny ever written, drunken benders, ghost ships, catacombs, a child tyrant, a gay wedding with flower crowns, giant slobbery dogs, lost and found family, and learning to live with debilitating mental illness: this book has a lot going for it. However, this was definitely the hardest to read of the Montague siblings trilogy, simply because it's hard to be inside Adrian's head, with his severe (SEVERE) anxiety that sometimes veers into bouts of OCD and mania. The plot is also definitely not its strongest feature, with a climax and resolution that certainly don't tidily answer the questions driving Adrian's actions for the prior 400ish pages of this not insubstantial novel, and a somewhat haphazard wild goose chase that ricochets from England to Morocco to Portugal to Iceland. However, it's such a treat to read Mackenzie Lee's characters, all of them disasters and many of them some kind of gay and/or gender nonconforming, transplanted into a wonderfully rendered historical fiction setting. I will read anything this author writes, hot damn.