Scan barcode
A review by amw207
The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee
3.0
I've been working through my own book collection and happened to own this one and have heard many good things about it. I did enjoy it! It was cute, I love period romances, I love the "friends to lovers" trope, and it was gay. HOWEVER, I've been sticking to OwnVoices YA lately, and I can definitely tell the difference between characters written by people that do not represent that group (mostly in Percy's case - a queer POC who suffers from a chronic illness) and characters written by people of that group. I enjoyed this at times, but I also can't get past white authors using period-specific offensive language for... not really a real purpose?
I think a lot of white authors fall into the trap of thinking they HAVE to put marginalized characters into a world where they're hated instead of... just creating a world that doesn't have the same set of societal standards that we do in the real world. I'm not saying that it should never happen but context is pretty important and Percy's story was certainly mostly about his otherness and we didn't learn much else about him. Also the whole "character of color used as a plot tool for the white main character's development" is certainly overused.
There are a lot of fantasy/historical fiction novels that do this and have a great cast of characters - The Nightrunner Series by Lynn Flewelling is a favorite of mine!
The plot was pretty standard too, nothing too wild. It was a quick read even though it's 500 pages long. Overall I love the concept of this and I was super excited to read it but the delivery fell flat for the aforementioned reasons.
I think a lot of white authors fall into the trap of thinking they HAVE to put marginalized characters into a world where they're hated instead of... just creating a world that doesn't have the same set of societal standards that we do in the real world. I'm not saying that it should never happen but context is pretty important and Percy's story was certainly mostly about his otherness and we didn't learn much else about him. Also the whole "character of color used as a plot tool for the white main character's development" is certainly overused.
There are a lot of fantasy/historical fiction novels that do this and have a great cast of characters - The Nightrunner Series by Lynn Flewelling is a favorite of mine!
The plot was pretty standard too, nothing too wild. It was a quick read even though it's 500 pages long. Overall I love the concept of this and I was super excited to read it but the delivery fell flat for the aforementioned reasons.