The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings, #2)

by Mackenzi Lee

He reaches out, like he might pat my hand, but I pull it off the table, for I am not a dog and therefore need no patting.

there are far worse things for a woman to be than a kind man’s wife.

Thank God for friends who learn to speak to you in your own language rather than making you learn theirs.

I feel generations of men who have kept women from their schools staring me down. Men like this never die—they’re chiseled in marble and erected in these halls.

the smirk of a man about to explain something to a woman that she already knows.

I want to strike flint and set it aflame. Burn everything from the sky down and start the world over.

Maybe the desert dreams of spilling rivers, valleys of a view. Maybe that hunger will one day pass.

“Reclaim is just theft in fancy dress.”

You are not a fool, you’re a fighter, and you deserve to be here. You deserve to take up space in this world.

I have learned that men respond best to nonthreatening women whose presence and space in the world does not somehow imperil their manhood,

The difference between fourteen and sixteen feels like centuries, time the greatest distance that can stretch between two people.

Best not to have friends at all, I remind myself. Best to explore the jungles alone.

Your beauty is not a tax you are required to pay to take up space in this world,

Returning to a place you once knew as well as your own shadow isn’t the same as never leaving at all.

It’s a queer thing, to have a vacant space inside you and not know what it is that carved out the absence.

feeling trapped within a shrinking box in an indifferent universe.

For one quiet moment, the world is still, and it is mine.

Then I brace my feet against the casements and rescue myself.

“Charm has never been a flower that blooms in your garden, has it?”

“It wasn’t a compliment.” “Anything can be a compliment if you take it as one.”

Johanna had let the world change her, let the winds polish her edges and the rain wear her smooth.

“Prickly?” I say. “I’m not prickly.” “Felicity Montague, you are a cactus.”

“You’re trying to play a game designed by men. You’ll never win, because the deck is stacked and marked, and also you’ve been blindfolded and set on fire.

“That’s the lie of it all. You have to be better to prove yourself worthy of being equal.”

Everyone has heard stories of women like us—cautionary tales, morality plays, warnings of what will befall you if you are a girl too wild for the world, a girl who asks too many questions or wants too much. If you set off into the world alone. Everyone has heard stories of women like us, and now we will make more of them.

“I think I want a house of my own,” I start, the words a discovery as they leave my mouth. “Something small, so I don’t have much housework, but enough room for a proper library. I want a lot of books. And I wouldn’t mind a good old dog to walk with me. And a bakery I go to every morning where they know my name.”

“I’d like to be on my own, but not alone.”

As well traveled and hard to shock as I pride myself on being, I realize when I meet the eyes of a woman across the road and she stares at me that I know nothing about this world.

“I’m not sure anyone is all good when you break us down to raw materials,” I say. “Max is all good.” “Max is a dog.” “I don’t see how that changes anything. He’s a good dog.”

“Let me dream that there is something unquestionably pure in this world.”

You are Felicity Montague, and you should have settled for a simple life.

men have needed much less of a reason to do much worse to a girl.

My life as an adventurer, a researcher, an independent woman with a world to discover has unfurled its sails yet again after a near miss with captivity.

I am a girl of steady hands, stout heart, and every book I have ever read.

I wonder what it’s like to be too beaten down to fight anymore. I hope I never learn.

“He’d rather follow in the great tradition of women cleaning up the messes made by men.” “Ah, the history of the world.”

It is not a failure to readjust my sails to fit the waters I find myself in.

In this moment, this place, this perch upon the edge of the world, it feels like the view goes on forever.

I want my life to be messy and ugly and wicked and wild, and I want to feel it all.