The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy is the second book in Mackenzi Lee’s Montague Siblings series, the young adult historical fiction trilogy that started with the much loved Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue. The first book followed Henry Monty Montague on a Grand Tour of eighteenth century Europe with his best friend Percy. This one belongs to his sister Felicity, the brilliant, frustrated young woman who has spent her short life being told that medicine is no place for a girl.

Felicity is in Edinburgh trying to bluff her way into medical school. When that fails, she comes up with a more outlandish plan. She will travel to Stuttgart to track down the brilliant German doctor Alexander Platt, whose work she has been studying, and convince him to take her on as a protege. Along the way she ends up entangled with a former friend named Sim, a young Muslim woman with secrets of her own, and the trip becomes much more dangerous and much more nautical than Felicity originally planned.

Mackenzi Lee writes historical YA with real research underneath the adventure. The eighteenth century medical scenes are accurate, the period details about what women in that era could and could not do are convincing, and the questions about colonialism, race, and gender that the trip surfaces are handled with real care. Felicity is also one of the more interesting recent YA protagonists. She is asexual, she is brilliant, she is sometimes insufferable about both, and she has to do real growing across the course of the novel.

For readers who liked the first Montague Siblings book, this is a worthy follow up that gives Felicity the spotlight she deserves. For new readers, you can start here, but you will want to go back and read Monty and Percy’s adventure too.