Glyph Review: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by MacKenzi Lee

My Rec

     Let's begin by remembering that this is a reading challenge as much as a blog collab between myself and author Johanna Parkurst, in which we are recommending books to each other in the hopes of trying to convince each other that our preferred literary genres are not total trash. For my part, I recommended the book 14 by Peter Clines to Johanna, and we'll get to the book she recc'ed to me in a bit.
      14 is the kind of book that isn't trying to be anything other than fun and interesting. I like this about it. It's not trying to turn anyone on sexually or have anyone peeking under their bed looking for monsters; in fact, it's the books that try too hard that come across as super cringe-worthy (50 Shades of "my inner goddess doing the meringue", anyone? Talk about horror.) 14 just happens to have some pretty dope monsters in it, but other than that, it's just trying to be a cool, fun story. This is why I chose it as Johanna's initial foray into horror fiction, as she frankly seemed influenced by contemporary film and television to believe that all horror media is about guts and gore. In fact, not long into her reading, she messaged me, "I'm just waiting for the house to come to life and start killing people."
      Guys, this is not what horror is about, or at least, it's not what it's always about. There's a difference between Slasher and Gore subgenres compared to the other subgenres of horror; let's not forget that Shelley's Frankenstein and Stoker's Dracula are considered gothic horror as well as classical canon today. Let's not forget that Stephen King is perhaps history's most prolific writer of horror novels, many of which have been adapted as films and television shows without resorting to sprays of arterial blood or festering piles of human viscera.  That's some Rob Zombie shit, which is fine if that's what you're into (and you only like it in a fictional setting), but it doesn't define horror.
        I mean. Who really was the monster in Shelley's Frankenstein?

“When the dimensional barriers were shattered, according to him, these things would come through and eat everything they could until the barriers reasserted themselves. Kind of the universe’s method of population control.” 
― Peter Clines, 14

     14 is a Weird fiction adventure that I would describe as "Scooby Doo meets The Call of Chthulu". It's a gang of goofy and earnest sleuths trying to figure out the deal with this steampunk style apartment building they live in, and finding out that its function as a place of residence is only nominal, a cover. It's not as hardcore of a dive into Weird as would be a novel like House of Leaves, but then again I'm trying to persuade a reluctant horror reader to enjoy the wonder and adventure and world-building that takes place in the genre, not turn her off by going too savage too soon. And it's a fun book for people who are into Weird in that it is riddled with allusions to Lovecraftian eldritch horrors and the Deep Ones, and when one realizes that this is one book in The Threshold series (Clines toyed with "Koturoverse" as the name of the series, but decided it wasn't commercial enough), then the allusions start to stack up as easter eggs between the other Clines books as well as across Lovecraft's Chthulu Mythos. It's fun, is what I'm saying, in the way that all geeky things are fun; the author wants the reader to feel like they are part of something bigger, and the audience is rewarded with dopamine-pumping flashes of recognition every time they encounter another lime-green cockroach with an extra leg. *BONUS* And in the audiobook edition, critically-acclaimed Ray Porter is the voice actor, and he's one of the best in the business. But of course, Johanna probably has her own take on how fun it may or may not be.

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Johanna's Rec

     ... Moving on, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by MacKenzi Lee is an interesting choice for Johanna to recommend to me for a couple of reasons. There is a 50/50 chance I would have selected this book for myself without prompting, in that it includes genre elements that I do enjoy, such as queer romance (pretty much the only kind of romance you would catch me reading; I'm tired of straight stories) and elements of magic realism. Thing is, is that the other 50% of the book is stuff I despise: teen romance, sick lit, period British setting, 
       Johanna didn’t specify a preference as to textual formatting, so I went with audiobook. Largely because I was about to start a long drive the same day she gave me the recommendation, honestly. I mildly disliked the experience of listening to it, but that’s just because I dislike English accents from a subjective, aesthetic perspective. The reading was objectively well-done; the problem is that English accents gross me out when they say stuff like, "And have you a name, my foxy lady?", or, "We both know that the true game is not in the cards, but in the coquettish removal of each subsequent article of clothing." I mean if there is anything that screams "PEARL-CLUTCHING AND PETTICOAT-RUFFLING" stereotypes, it's an English accent describing the fumbling sexploits of a rakish young man just waiting to be tamed by love and lust. And when one of the characters was mentioned for the second time excusing himself because of a headache, it was so obvious that I was in for a sick lit plot line that I rolled my eyes so hard that I momentarily worried I would hit a deer. I recall the feeling so distinctly that I remember exactly where I was in my drive when I heard it. 
       The main character is one of the most irredeemable personalities I have ever read in Young Adult fiction, and allow me to remind you at this point, I have read the entire Twilight series. Henry "Monty" Montague, who sleeps around mostly with other dudes but occasionally with girls, is rich and spoiled and responds to authority with childish lashing-out. At one point in the book, he is so mad at another character for being rude at a party that he considers pissing in the man's desk drawer, and only elects to avoid that action because there's an attractive girl in the room with him. Instead, Monty steals an object of obvious worth from the man's desk, getting the plot rolling. Monty is throughout the novel an unreliable narrator who careens from guarded standoffishness to his crush to obsession that proves destructive to everyone around him, and in the very last chapter of the book seems to realize, "Oh. It turns out that other people have wishes and desires and rights of their own. Huh." And that is the whole of his development as a character. If you can't tell, I am not a fan.
       Which might have been ok yet, except that all the other characters are more archetypes than personalities. There’s the “good black kid who’s just down on his luck in a racist society” with very little else interesting about him (and of course he's light enough to mostly pass but dark enough for it to be just inconvenient), and the “fierce girl who is smarter than people give her credit for and dreams of a life without having to follow society’s notions of what a woman’s life should be”. With that level of predictability, it really doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room for how the plot will develop. There's some cursory commentary about straight privilege, white privilege, and male privilege, and if you can believe it, all of that takes place in one conversation in one part of one chapter, like the author needed to tick them off some "woke-factor" checklist all at once so that she could get on with actually telling the story. 
       Thematically the book is more successful despite the fact that it can't decide what it wants to be (Historical Queer Romance Sick Lit YA Coming of Age Paranormal Adventure). Here's some quotes that demonstrate the consistency of the imagery and the themes:

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“We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with lacquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved.”

“The stars dust gold leafing on his skin. And we are looking at each other, just looking, and I swear there are whole lifetimes lived in those small, shared moments.” 

“Against the sky, the stars crown him, marking the edges of his silhouette like he is a constellation of himself.” 

“In the east," she says after a time, her gaze still downcast, "there is a tradition known as kintsukuroi. It is the practice of mending broken ceramic pottery using lacquer dusted with gold and silver and other precious metals. It is meant to symbolize that things can be more beautiful for having been broken."

It's a tale about healing and medicine and fate and stars and choice, which the male lead seems to negate for the bulk of the story by bulldozing everyone around him with his actions and choices, even when one of them is collapsing in seizures (yes, I know that is the point; my point is that it never really recovers from that set up; the character development is more like a consistent slope that a discernible arc). The themes and plot lines become evident fairly quickly and are delivered with the nuance of a wealthy teenage boy trying to rebel against his conservative father; what with one person insisting on partying constantly, another refusing to take off her glasses and put down her books, and the last constantly retiring early due to headaches and faintness, it's pretty clear what these kids are in for and what lessons need to be learned. 
       In terms of genre, I did not think the paranormal component was particularly well-done, and I didn’t buy the central romance as being more than infatuation, particularly because of the way the protagonist is depicted in his internal monologues, essentially fantasizing about groping the object of his affection while simultaneously being mildly irritated by his propriety and the inconveniences of his race. I also don’t read sick lit or coming of age tales, and I don’t think this book is a strong enough example of either of those genres to turn my head. So I think the experiment failed for me in this respect, because much of the book already falls under genres I’m cool with, and because it’s trying to do so much, the parts that I’m not cool with are not as fleshed out as they could be.

To be clear; I disliked this book, and because of the nature of the challenge of this blog collab, I went ahead and gave it a second listen this weekend to see if I was maybe just being a judgey dick without an open mind. What I determined is that it remains to be seen whether I am a judgey dick, but at the end of the day, I really do dislike this book, and I disliked it more with my second listen. Nevertheless, I'm going to award it my first Halvsies vote, because while I found it in turns pedantic and predictable, its themes are self-affirming content that  a queer or questioning kid might benefit from reading. I would 100% recommend this book to a kiddo, queer or no, and 100% like to never have to read it again myself. 

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So that's a pretty tough review on my part to start out with, but rest assured friends, I'm not counting on it being one-sided. Tune in next time when Johanna reviews my favorite book If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino, and I plunge into a book she promises will send me to tears when I read ​Far from the Tree by Robin Benway.