MacKenzi Lee Books in Order

If you want the signature historical adventure: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue → The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy → The Gentleman’s Guide to Getting Lucky → The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks
If you want a dark standalone: This Monstrous Thing
If you want Marvel antihero origins: Loki: Where Mischief Lies → Gamora & Nebula: Sisters in Arms → The Winter Soldier: Cold Front
If you want witty nonfiction history: Bygone Badass Broads → The History of the World in Fifty Dogs
If you want adult historical romance: Lady Like

MacKenzi Lee grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, in a half-Mormon, half-not household where books were around from the start. She has said that she loved reading as a kid, even when reading itself did not always come easily, and that audiobooks were a big part of how she fell into stories.

She was a Star Wars kid long before that felt especially trendy.

Like a lot of future writers, she also hit a point in school where assigned reading crowded out the fun. Then history pulled her in. As a teenager she worked at a living history park in Salt Lake City as a blacksmith, making iron goods, talking with visitors, and spending her summers basically cosplaying the past.

That job helped shape what came next. Lee studied history as an undergraduate and spent a year in the UK focused on the Wars of the Roses. At first she thought she might become a professor, but she kept gravitating toward the people hidden inside the footnotes, especially women and other figures who were present in history but often pushed to the edges of the story.

A teacher once told her that her history papers read like novels. That was supposed to be a correction. Lee took it more like a signpost. She later earned an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Simmons College, and the work she did there helped turn writing from a hope into a plan.

She also spent years working as a bookseller, which feels important to the whole picture.

Her fiction debut, This Monstrous Thing, arrived in 2015 and already had many of the things readers now associate with her work: a deep love of history, a taste for adventure, and characters trying to build a life inside systems that want to define them. The book reimagines Frankenstein in 1818 Geneva, with clockwork bodies, grief, love, and a real moral mess at the center.

Then came The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue, the book that pushed her into a much bigger spotlight. Its mix of eighteenth-century road-trip chaos, queer romance, family strain, and sharp humor made it a breakout hit. The novel became a New York Times bestseller, earned a Stonewall Honor, and won the New England Book Award. Readers often come for the banter and pace, then stay for the sibling dynamics and the way Lee makes the past feel busy, strange, and alive.

She has never stayed in just one lane. The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy gives Felicity Montague a story built around medicine, ambition, and friendship. Bygone Badass Broads grew out of Lee's popular social media series about overlooked women from history, and The History of the World in Fifty Dogs shows the same curiosity in a much goofier register. She has also written official novels for Marvel and Masters of the Universe, and with Lady Like she moved into adult historical romance.

Across all of that work, a few interests keep returning. Lee likes characters who have been handed a role they do not want, whether that role comes from family, society, myth, or history itself. She writes a lot about queer lives, messy loyalty, reinvention, and the gap between who a person is and who the world assumes they are.

These days she lives in Los Angeles, where she works as a bookseller, drinks too much Diet Coke, and naps with her St. Bernard. It feels very on-brand, part literary life, part dog person, part enthusiastic history nerd, and still clearly someone who loves putting the right book into a reader's hands.