Review of The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue. (mild spoilers; more specific or major spoilers are indicated) I read it in three days, which seems to be the standard absolute fastest I can read 500-page books, so basically I loved it. It was wild and addictive and the romance was really great and it was very funny and educational also. Some of the things I have against it were that the bi/pan/polyromantic main character (!) was very promiscuous, which is just too common a stereotype, and yes, bi people have as much right to be promiscuous as any other people, but this seems to be the case with more than 50% of the representation I can find. Another thing was that I didn't really seem to get much of a sense of Percy's character, so it was mostly just Monty admiring him, but what I did get was definitely likeable. On the other hand, I freaking loved Felicity's character. She is canonically aro/ace, which is something there is literally no representation for pretty much ever, so that was amazing, and then as a person she was also the best. I kind of nearly died when she told Monty that she'd been reading medical books with the covers of trashy romance novels on top. From there, she was kickass and really admirable. The pirates also were great, and the way the book slid in issues of race, homophobia, abuse, and how illnesses were dealt with at the time was awesome as it could easily have ignored them. Monty's development and character were also great, though I felt like the whole debauched lifestyle part of his character went a bit overboard at times. To review, and spoilers here, in this book, we have:

a protagonist who fancies people of multiple genders and is a domestic abuse victim

a probably gay half-white hallf-African main character with epilepsy

an aro/ace girl who wants to be a doctor

many other mixed race and non-white characters

In a book I think set in the 1700s, this is kind of amazing. Also if anyone hasn't I definitely recommend reading the historical background part at the back because it was really interesting.