The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy; The Nobleman’s Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks, by Mackenzi Lee

These two sequels pick up where The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue leaves off. Or rather, the Lady’s Guide picks up not too long afterwards, with Felicity (Monty’s sister from the first novel) desperately trying to figure out how to become a doctor at a time when women were banned from studying medicine, and ending up on a madcap voyage through Europe. The Nobleman’s Guide picks up the story twenty years later, when the baby sibling Monty and Felicity left behind has grown to young manhood and meets the siblings he never knew he had. This is perhaps the biggest flaw with the third novel: it has to happen twenty years later in order for Adrian to grow up, but Monty and Felicity don’t feel like people approaching or just past forty; their reactions, problems, and solutions are still those of the young people they were in the first two books.

Despite this, these are fun historical romps (with some deliberate anachronisms and the occasional touch of the paranormal) that continue to answer the question: how did people cope with supposedly “modern” issues (bisexuality, asexuality, feminism, mental illness, etc etc etc) at a time when all those things existed but without the understanding and language we currently have to talk about them. While the Montague siblings’ adventures often stretch credibility, they’re always fun journey and a little bit thought-provoking.