The grandest and touriest of Grand Tours
Jul. 6th, 2022 09:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileIn my bag o’ trashy summer reads I decided to pick what I think may have been the fluffiest book on my TBR shelf, or what at least looked like it: The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee, which I had picked up during a friend’s book cleanout last fall.
The book follows three English young persons as they go on the traditional Grand Tour sometime in seventeen-whatever-the-fuck, which is promptly derailed by a series of avoidable and less-avoidable hijinks. Our narrator is Monty, a disaster bisexual (emphasis on the “disaster”) who is very close to getting disinherited if he doesn’t get his head on straight one of these days. Monty likes partying entirely too hard, his own appearance, and his best friend Percy. Monty dislikes his physically abusive father, taking anything remotely seriously, and babies. His traveling companions are his aforementioned lifelong best friend Percy, the biracial illegitimate nephew and ward of some respectable admiral and whomst Monty has been in love with for several years, and Felicity, Monty’s bluestocking younger sister whomst is being packed off to finishing school instead of the kind of school she’d like to go to (i.e. a real one, like medical school), most of which do not admit women.
The book–and the Tour–start off with a variety of Animal House-like embarrassing escapades that could probably have been avoided if Monty wasn’t quite so committed to drowning everything his father has done to him in every drop of liquor in Europe. Things get disastrous in a somewhat less predictable way when Monty steals an innocuous-looking puzzle box from the Duke of Bourbon during a sexcapade gone wrong with the duke’s mistress in the duke’s apartments in Versailles. This sets them on a series of extremely Boy’s Own adventures that include getting ambushed by highwaymen, getting kidnapped by pirates and eventually joining them (of course), a short stint in jail, seeking a magical McGuffin in an ancient tomb, all that sort of thing. The only thing missing was a Texan. (This book might have taken place a bit early for that, actually; I think that was more of a nineteenth-century thing.)
It was extremely entertaining and while I don’t think I’d bother to give it a reread, I could certainly see myself picking up the sequel next time I wanted something very fluffy and eighteenth-century-flavored. Especially since I’ve heard the sequel has more of Felicity.
The book follows three English young persons as they go on the traditional Grand Tour sometime in seventeen-whatever-the-fuck, which is promptly derailed by a series of avoidable and less-avoidable hijinks. Our narrator is Monty, a disaster bisexual (emphasis on the “disaster”) who is very close to getting disinherited if he doesn’t get his head on straight one of these days. Monty likes partying entirely too hard, his own appearance, and his best friend Percy. Monty dislikes his physically abusive father, taking anything remotely seriously, and babies. His traveling companions are his aforementioned lifelong best friend Percy, the biracial illegitimate nephew and ward of some respectable admiral and whomst Monty has been in love with for several years, and Felicity, Monty’s bluestocking younger sister whomst is being packed off to finishing school instead of the kind of school she’d like to go to (i.e. a real one, like medical school), most of which do not admit women.
The book–and the Tour–start off with a variety of Animal House-like embarrassing escapades that could probably have been avoided if Monty wasn’t quite so committed to drowning everything his father has done to him in every drop of liquor in Europe. Things get disastrous in a somewhat less predictable way when Monty steals an innocuous-looking puzzle box from the Duke of Bourbon during a sexcapade gone wrong with the duke’s mistress in the duke’s apartments in Versailles. This sets them on a series of extremely Boy’s Own adventures that include getting ambushed by highwaymen, getting kidnapped by pirates and eventually joining them (of course), a short stint in jail, seeking a magical McGuffin in an ancient tomb, all that sort of thing. The only thing missing was a Texan. (This book might have taken place a bit early for that, actually; I think that was more of a nineteenth-century thing.)
It was extremely entertaining and while I don’t think I’d bother to give it a reread, I could certainly see myself picking up the sequel next time I wanted something very fluffy and eighteenth-century-flavored. Especially since I’ve heard the sequel has more of Felicity.