Review: A Duke of One's Own by Emma Orchard*

*I received a copy of this book in eBook format in return for this review. All reviews published on Yours, Chloe are completely honest and my own, and are in now way influenced by the gifting opportunity. This review is being posted as part of the A Duke Of One's Own blog tour hosted by Rachel's Random Resources.

Title: A Duke Of One's Own
Author: Emma Orchard
Genre: Historical Romance

Trigger warnings:  Guns, Blackmail, Death Of A Parent, References To War

Rating: ★★★★

Spice Level: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ (Explicit Open Door)

Summer, 1816. A notorious rebel is about to meet her match...

Lady Georgiana Pendlebury is no stranger to breaking the rules of polite society. But when a so-called ‘friend’ invites her to a clandestine party, Georgiana is shocked to discover the event is more scandalous than even she could have imagined. So when a mysterious stranger offers help, she accepts, not realising their encounter will turn her life upside down.

Later that summer, Georgiana is invited to attend a house party at an infamous castle in Yorkshire. The gathering is a loosely veiled effort to arrange a marriage for the Duke of Northriding, who desperately needs an heir. Duke Gabriel Mauleverer has a terrible reputation as a rake, and Georgiana is happy to be a guest purely for the entertainment, but upon arrival, she is shocked to discover that the Duke is none other than the stranger who rescued her weeks earlier.

As the other ladies vie for the Duke’s attention, Georgiana is desperate to avoid their shocking secret getting out. But she finds herself caught, unable to avoid Gabriel’s gaze. Are they a threat to each other? Or could they be the answer to each other’s greatest desires?

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A Duke Of One’s Own is the latest compelling regency romance from author Emma Orchard. Set in 1816, in the middle of the regency era, our story is packed full of all of your favourite regency romance tropes and is perfect for both seasoned regency readers and readers who are newer to the genre.

Emma Orchard is an incredible storyteller who had me hooked from the very first chapter. Her vivid descriptions made the Yorkshire coastal castle setting of Northriding Castle come alive on the page. The chapters set here felt very Gothic in style which I loved, and I was fascinated by all of the little secret passageways and doors which Gabriel was able to use to secretly visit Georgiana.

This is a lighter regency romance read which is perfect if you’re looking for something quick and steamy (no pun intended!). I easily read the whole book in a single sitting of a couple of hours thanks to how fast-paced and engaging the narrative was.

As previously stated, A Duke Of One’s Own is full of all of your favourite regency romance tropes and they are all wonderfully written. This includes an age gap romance between a virgin heroine and a brooding older Duke and a forced marriage as a result of these characters being found in a compromising situation.

Lady Georgiana Pendlebury, or Georgie as she’s known by her loved ones, is our feisty and headstrong debutante FMC. Our brooding, swoon-worthy silver fox MMC is Gabriel Mauleverer, the Duke of Northriding. The way Gabriel talked about Georgie was gorgeous and he fell first, and harder, which was really well portrayed within the story. I’m also a sucker for a good sickbed scene, especially when it’s the MMC taking care of the FMC, and this was wonderfully done within A Duke Of One’s Own. If I hadn’t already been head over heels in love with Gabriel by that point in the story, how he looked after Georgie would have done it.

Georgie and Gabriel had great chemistry and – especially for a miscommunication trope hater like myself -seeing such open and honest communication between the two of them was wonderful. We have lots of really hot spicy scenes throughout the book and they navigated the contrast of experience between Georgie as a virgin FMC and Gabriel as a more experienced and older MMC very well. Their great communication continued within their steamier encounters, particularly around consent and exploration of potential kinks, which was great to see within a regency romance.

A Duke Of One’s Own has great LGBTQIA+ representation within the story which was fantastic to see, especially as the representation came without any real comment outside of just total familial acceptance. Miss Spry – who was, to quote the book, Georgie’s aunts “sapphic companion” – was my favourite supporting character, particularly when she said to Georgie “You’re not a possession, though the law says you are”.

A Duke Of One’s Own is the second instalment of the The Runaway Heiress series but the story also works well as a standalone story and this was my introduction to the series. As I was reading I did find myself getting really interested in the backstory of Georgiana’s brother Hal and his wife Cassandra so I was really excited to see that they were the focus of the first book in the series (The Runaway Heiress) and it has gone straight onto my TBR. Within A Duke Of One’s Own we also get a little peek into the next instalment of the series (What the Lady Wants – due to be published in August 2024) through the introduction of the character of Isabella and I’m now highly anticipating the release of this next book.

Overall, A Duke Of One’s Own is a fantastic spicy regency romp, perfect when you want a lighter historical read which is still packed full of steam and romance. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the series has in store.

Review: Oar Than Friends by Lulu Moore*

 *I received a copy of this book in eBook format via NetGalley in return for this review. All reviews published on Yours, Chloe are completely honest and my own, and are in now way influenced by the gifting opportunity.

Title: Oar Than Friends
Author: Lulu Moore
Genre: Romance

Trigger warnings:  Death Of A Sibling

Rating: ★★★★★

Spice Level: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ (Open Door)

She's rowing for Cambridge. He's rowing for Oxford. But they just can't keep one another at oar's length . . .

Arthur Osbourne-Cloud has his future mapped out for him – graduate Oxford and follow his dreadful father into politics. Except Arthur wants anything but that. He’d rather spend his days rowing for gold at the Olympics,.

And this year he has the Boat Race to win.

Kate Astley also has her future mapped out. Fly half-way across the world, and win a scholarship at Cambridge University to study medicine. Oh, and crew for the legendary Boat Race. Seems simple enough.

But then she meets Arthur.

For Arthur, this feisty American challenges everything he's been taught to believe, while Kate battles between what she's expected to do, and what she wants to do.

The bitter rivalry between their universities ought to destroy them. Or will it just be a matter of time before they surrender to the sizzling chemistry between them?

But In The Boat Race, there can only be one winner. Who will sink and who will swim?

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Oar Than Friends is the latest sports romance from author Lulu Moore and the first instalment in her new Oxbridge series. It is the love story between Kate and Oz, two athletes competing for rival university rowing clubs, set against the backdrop of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race.

I grew up around 30 miles from Cambridge so have followed the boat race for years and it was the perfect backdrop for a rivals to lovers sports romance. If you’re unfamiliar with the Boat Race, it’s a set of rowing races between the Cambridge University Boat Club and the Oxford University Boat Club which take place on the River Thames in London and has been an annual event since 1856. Lulu Moore nailed the blend between the story being focused on the romance but also including a good amount of rowing content leading up to race day.

If you’re a sucker for a romance story where he falls first and harder, you’ll absolutely love Arthur Osbourne-Cloud (or ‘Oz’ as he’s known). I very quickly fell in love with Oz’s charm and when he said he had known Kate for “fifty-six hours, and I’d thought about her for every single one” he awarded himself the award for my absolute favourite book boyfriend of 2024 so far. He was a swoon-worthy MMC and his nicknames for Kate and little romantic gestures throughout the story completely stole my heart. Hearing his girlfriend cry on the phone and instantly jumping in the car to drive two hours to see her? Now THAT is what we’re talking about! I was really rooting for Oz and Kate right from their brilliant meet cute scene until the end of the book; they were a brilliant match.

Our story is told through a dual POV narrative and I LOVE this in a romance story. Hearing the MMC’s POV adds something so special to the story, particularly when it’s a ‘he falls first and harder’ story, and this was perfectly illustrated by Oz who spoke about Kate in the sweetest way. Oar Than Friends does also have some fab open-door spicy scenes but these felt really realistic which I loved.

Kate was a brilliant strong FMC and it was great to see her grow in confidence as the novel progressed and begin to really advocate for her own needs and dreams. The loss of her elder brother was well explored, as was Oz’s difficult family dynamic.

Oar Than Friends also has a fantastic cast of supporting characters who brought so much to the story and I’m excited to potentially return to them later in the Oxbridge series.

In Kate and Oz we have an American FMC and a British MMC and I loved this dynamic. It does mean that we see Kate use American terms rather than British ones (e.g. dorm, campus) which could be a bit grating for a British reader but I didn’t really mind it at all.

Humour was woven into the story brilliantly and I particularly loved how British the humour was. Kate and Oz had brilliant banter and we had some fantastic flirty moments in the early stages of their relationship. I also loved the individual chapter titles and they often made me giggle.

Overall, Oar Than Friends is a fantastic rivals to lovers sports romance novel which is packed full of witty banter, charm and loveable characters.

Review: Girl Abroad by Elle Kennedy*

 *I received a copy of this book in eBook format via NetGalley in return for this review. All reviews published on Yours, Chloe are completely honest and my own, and are in now way influenced by the gifting opportunity.

Title: Girl Abroad
Author: Elle Kennedy
Genre: Romance

Trigger warnings:  Absent Parent, Drugs

Rating: ★★★ 
Spice Level: 🌶️🌶️🌶️(Open Door)

When nineteen-year-old Abbey Bly gets the opportunity to study abroad for a year in London, it's the perfect chance to finally slip out from under the thumb of her beloved but overbearing retired rock star father. She's ready to be free, to discover herself - but first off, to meet the girls she's rooming with. That is, until she arrives at her gorgeous new flat to discover those roommates are actually all boys. Charming, funny, insufferably attractive boys. And off-limits, with a rule against fraternizing between housemates after unwanted drama with the previous girl.

Abbey has never considered herself a rulebreaker. But soon, she's lying to her father about her living situation and falling for not one, but two men she can't have: her rugby-player roommate and a broody musician with a girlfriend. Not to mention, her research for school has gotten her tangled in a deeply hidden scandal of a high nobility family, surrounding her in secrets on all sides.

If there's any hope of Abbey finding love, answers, or a future in London, she'll have to decide which rules - and hearts - might be worth breaking . . .

 -

Girl Abroad is the latest romance novel from New York Times bestselling author Elle Kennedy. Our protagonist Abbey moves to London from Nashville for a year studying abroad, moving into the shared house she thinks she’s sharing with four female roommates who turn out to actually all be attractive guys. Abbey then finds herself in a love triangle with one housemate – despite a strict no flatcest rule – and one of their friends – despite him having a girlfriend.

This was my first time reading anything from the author but based on other reviews it appears this isn’t her usual style. The book largely read as a mature YA story with a few spicy scenes thrown in.

I tend to not actually go for the love-triangle trope but something about this book really intrigued me and the trope did end up working quite well, definitely supported by the focus on all three parties not expecting commitment. I was incredibly conflicted for the majority of the book as to which MMC I wanted Abbey to end up with but (being mindful of avoiding spoilers) she did end up making the right choice in my eyes.

I had a real love/hate relationship with Abbey as a protagonist. I liked the banter she had with her flatmates and particularly her relationship with Mr Baxley the librarian (who, aside from their demon pet cat, was my favourite character) but aside from this she felt like a largely two-dimensional character so it was at times difficult to see why she had half of England falling at her feet. Morally it was quite difficult to get on board with her too as she spent half of the book preaching that she wasn’t the kind of girl to steal another girl’s boyfriend but then went and did it anyway, using the technicality that nothing physical happened between them whilst he was still in a relationship.

It did also feel like all of the male characters were quite two dimensional also and based around stereotypes. Jack was a blonde, tanned, muscular Australian rugby player who spent more time shirtless than not, Jamie was a posh playboy and Nate was a free-sprit motorbike-driving musician. They did start to explore Jack and Nate’s characters on a deeper level as their relationships with Abbey blossomed but I would have liked this to have been developed even further. The character I was most disappointed with was Lee who was portrayed as your stereotypical 00s rom-com gay best friend when he had the potential to be so much more than that, had he been better written.

In terms of spice-level this is probably a low 3 out of 5. There are a couple of open-door spicier scenes which are largely well written, but the majority of potentially good spicy scenes, especially involving Jack, had a fade to black which was a shame. It was disappointing that there wasn’t more of an even split of spicy scenes between the two love interests.

I do, however, want to praise the positive portrayal of female pleasure that we have within one of the scenes between Abbey and Nate, one of the male love interests. During a spicier scene, Nate actually asks Abbey “what do you need to come?”, acknowledging that few women can climax from penetration alone and that most will require another form of stimulation. We love respectful lovers like Nate who prioritise their partners pleasure alongside their own and actually understand how the female body works! This was ruined slightly later in the scene when it felt like Abbey mocked him for saying this but this largely felt like a really important portrayal of female pleasure.

I was disappointed with the fact that it felt like the UK university experience hadn’t been very well researched at all, which feels like a fundamental flaw in a book about someone studying abroad in London. In Girl Abroad, Abbey starts her first semester in August when UK university academic years don’t actually start until at least mid-September. There were also language choices which were incorrect, such as use of ‘spring break’ which isn’t a thing in the UK, we have an Easter break. The idea of university students living in Notting Hill was also borderline ridiculous and implied that the author’s only understanding of British life comes from 90s and 00s British romcoms and the Taylor Swift song London Boy. There seemed to be few other references to British culture – aside from a few pub trips – so it just didn’t feel authentic to British student life which was disappointing and a real missed opportunity.

I did largely like the historical mystery element to the novel – as Abbey tries to uncover the identity of the woman in a mysterious painting she picked up at an estate sale, as part of her studies – and the way it mirrored the love triangle Abbey found herself in but at times it felt like it took away from the romance plot.

Overall, this was a largely enjoyable read it just lacked quite a lot of the substance I was craving. Those who want an easy romance read, especially fans of the love triangle trope, will like this book.

Review: The American Wife by Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger *

  *I received a copy of this book in eBook format via NetGalley in return for this review. All reviews published on Yours, Chloe are completely honest and my own, and are in now way influenced by the gifting opportunity.

Title: The American Wife
Author: Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger
Genre: Historical Fiction

Trigger warnings:  War, Antisemitism, Guns

Rating: ★★

With her heart in her mouth, Kitty let herself into her husband’s private study. She knew where he kept the papers that might save her dearest friend from the Nazis. She just had to steal them…

Vienna, 1937. When beautiful American Kitty becomes engaged to Austrian diplomat Edgar, she finds herself thrown into a very different world in Europe, and soon longs for home. But when the woman designing her wedding dress, Judith, takes Kitty under her wing, she sees the city of Vienna in a new light – a city of culture and music that she can explore with her new friend.

But when the Nazis come, the fact that Judith is Jewish means she is no longer safe. Kitty knows that as a diplomat’s wife she can steal the papers that will allow her closest friend to escape to safety, but will it mean betraying the love of her life?

Except that Edgar has grown distant and secretive since she joined him in Europe and, when war breaks out, Kitty wonders which side her husband is really on. And, as she prepares to betray him, Kitty begins to fear that she doesn’t really know the man she married at all.

Facing an impossible choice between her dearest friend and the man she loves, Kitty knows she must be brave, and do the right thing, no matter the personal cost…

 

The American Wife is the latest historical fiction novel by Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger and the first in her new ‘The Diplomat’s Wife’ book series.

I want to preface this review by saying that I did really want to like the book as a story focusing on the annexation of Austria and the lives of American diplomats living in pre-war Europe was a really interesting concept but unfortunately it did really miss the mark for me.

One of my primary criticisms of the book was that it tried to be too many things. There were three distinctly separate aspects to the story: Kitty’s work for the US embassy processing visa applications for those trying to leave Austria, the relationship between her and her diplomat husband Edgar despite their apparent opposing political views and her work for the Austrian resistance protecting people being persecuted by the Nazis. All three aspects were interesting plot points in themselves but it felt like they were fighting for page space and therefore none of them were explored in the depth I was craving.

I did particularly find the exploration of the American visa application process for people trying to escape Nazi persecution to be very interesting and something I hadn’t seen before in other Second World War historical fiction novels. It was particularly powerful to see the book shed a light on the impact of international antisemitism

I unfortunately didn’t warm to Kitty’s character at all and that did have a big impact on my overall enjoyment of the story. She felt incredibly immature, selfish and generally unlikeable. Although she did have redeeming qualities such as her determination to do whatever it takes to protect the friends she hadn’t even known for that long, these moments of bravery and thoughtfulness didn’t quite do enough to make up for her negative traits unfortunately.

Although I can be a fan of the instalove trope normally, it was really quite hard to root for Kitty and Edgar’s relationship at all. Their initial connection felt very superficial and their marriage was incredibly rushed, although we are told that this was very typical of Kitty’s character. It was inevitable that the cracks in their relationship would start to show very quickly and I honestly didn’t find myself really caring if they found their way back to each other or not. Kitty was clearly not mature enough for marriage and I felt Edgar would have actually been better finding someone more mature and trusting.

Although they were only supporting characters, I actually found myself really drawn to the different characters within ‘The Gang’ and felt they would have actually been much stronger protagonists than Kitty and Edgar. I am curious to see the direction Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger plans to take the rest of the series to see if we get any further exploration of their stories.

The ending of The American Wife paves the way for the next book in the series although I have to say I did find it predictable, particularly the ‘big twist’ about Pim’s identity.

Overall, whilst The American Wife did feel well researched, the plot and characters really didn’t grip me unfortunately and it ended up feeling like I was having to drag myself towards the end of the book. As stated previously, this was a shame as the different aspects of the storyline were interesting but they just weren’t as effectively executed as I would have wanted.

Review: Your Dream For Me by Alison Schaffir*

 *I received a copy of this book in eBook format via NetGalley in return for this review. All reviews published on Yours, Chloe are completely honest and my own, and are in now way influenced by the gifting opportunity.

Title: Your Dream For Me
Author: Alison Schaffir
Genre: Young Adult Romance

Trigger warnings:  Sexual Assault

Rating: ★★

Your Dream For Me tells the story of seventeen-year-old Scarlett who dreams of becoming a renowned fashion designer. One day, whilst exploring the costume room of her school’s drama department, she meets Nathaniel, the new kid at school who is a very talented actor, and instantly falls for him. With Nathaniel’s encouragement she decides to get involved back-stage at the school’s play to learn more about theatre costuming and get to spend more time with Nathaniel. But Nathaniel’s scene partner Tina is trying to steal him away from Scarlett and a distressing event causes her best friend Macie – and then Nathaniel – to distance themselves from her.

I’ll preface the review by saying that I wanted to love the book. As a big theatre fan I really liked the idea of a theatre-based romance between someone working on-stage and someone working off-stage but unfortunately it just wasn’t executed well and fell really flat for me. Although Your Dream For Me is a YA novel, it largely felt more suitable for a younger audience, potentially as a transitional read between the middle grade and YA genres. Largely I think this is down to the characters as not only do they lack any real depth and have very little character development during the story but they also really lack maturity. Our protagonist Scarlett had a very immature voice which would have been more fitting in a 13/14 year old character than a 17 year old. She had very dramatic spiralling reactions to things that could have been resolved through simple communication and honestly just didn’t seem mature enough to have a relationship, despite the romance being a major plot point.

Unfortunately, not only is Scarlett immature but she is also quite unlikeable. She felt very self-centred and naïve and I struggled to understand why the other characters thought she was so superior to everyone else. Scarlett is also very disillusioned about the world around her as although she has big ambitions of going to a world-renowned fashion school to train as a fashion designer, she doesn’t seem to be doing anything to work towards it. She seemed very disillusioned that a good GPA, fashionable dress sense and a Saturday job in a clothes shop would give her any chance of getting in to such a prestigious school when she lacked basic fashion designing skills such as sewing. On a similar note, Scarlett also seems to really lack any kind of drive. She is desperate for a sewing machine but the second she gets one she decides it’s too hard to learn and she’ll have to wait until someone else teaches her. You’d expect a character with such high ambition to have the drive to teach herself through books or YouTube tutorials but this just isn’t the case. And then we’re then expected to believe that she could fashion a high-quality prom dress in a mere matter of weeks, after a single sewing lesson? Even the most gifted of dressmakers would have struggled with that.

The character of Nathaniel did charm me from his very first appearance and I think his character is one of the highlights of the story, which makes it disappointing that we see so little of him despite him being the main love interest. I also liked the character of Gavin and thought it a shame that we saw so little of him, particularly as he seemed to be only used as a sounding board by Scarlett rather than as the good friend he had the potential to be.

I did find the speed that Scarlett fell for Nathaniel very unrealistic and superficial as she is practically besotted with the boy after a mere 5 minute interaction where they don’t even swap names let alone any real details about each other. Fans of the insta-love trope might enjoy it for this reason but it just wasn’t for me. I didn’t buy into their chemistry and although I appreciate that teenage crushes can be quite intense, this just seemed beyond anything you’d actually see in real life and therefore made it difficult to root for the relationship.

The conflict which leads to Nathaniel ghosting Scarlett was a little bit ridiculous (although no more ridiculous than Scarlett’s responses to it) and I struggled with the instant-reprieve the main antagonist Tina had after simply apologising. It made the drama feel even more superficial and I would have considered not finishing the book had it not been so close to the end. The ending of the story is incredibly frustrating and I think the less said about it the better but overall I think it’s testament to the lack of maturity we see in Scarlett.

I am keen to highlight some of the strengths of the book through and I think the representation of a strong female friendship through Scarlett and Macie is one of them. But unfortunately this doesn’t last the duration of the story as they start to clash with each other after Macie is sexually assaulted (which is a major potential trigger all prospective readers need to be aware of). Scarlett is initially very supportive of her friend but I grew very quickly frustrated by Scarlett’s lack of empathy to how the trauma of the assault was affecting her friend. In one of the chapters, she starts going on about how everyone is leaving her and it’s all very woe is me, completely disregarding how her friend is feeling and why she might be distancing herself away. This all further demonstrated a real lack of maturity in Scarlett which only made her even more unlikeable.

I did really like Macie and I thought the exploration of Macie’s assault and the effect it had on her was really interesting and well executed. So much so, that I think the character was wasted as a supporting character and would have made a much more interesting protagonist than Scarlett. I would have loved a narrative focused on Macie and how she begins to recover from the trauma of the assault, with a potential friends to lovers romance between her and Liam. Overall, I think that would have made a much stronger story than what we got from Scarlett and Nathaniel.

Overall, I think Your Dream For Me would be a good read for a younger YA audience who may be oblivious to the issues with characterisation and plot and simply be able to enjoy it as a cute high school romance.

Review: The Polish Girl by Gosia Nealon*

      *I received a copy of this book in eBook format via NetGalley in return for this review. All reviews published on Yours, Chloe are completely honest and my own, and are in now way influenced by the gifting opportunity.

 Caution - This review does contain spoilers.

Title: The Polish Girl
Author: Gosia Nealon
Genre: Historical Fiction

Trigger warnings:  War, Antisemitism, Violence, Guns, Rape

Rating: ★★★★★

The Polish Girl is a renamed republishing of the first book in Gosia Nealon’s Secret Resistance Series: ‘The Last Sketch’. It tells the story of Wanda, a young Polish woman who is working for the Polish resistance in memory of her late Father who was murdered by the Gestapo. Whilst completing a resistance assignment she comes face to face with the man who killed her father and is immediately sickened but he quietly tells her “I am not who you think I am” and reveals himself to actually be Finn, the identical twin brother of the Gestapo officer, who is impersonating his evil brother in an undercover mission for the Allies. The story follows Wanda and Finn’s fight for survival, and fight for each other, amongst the events of the final year of the Second World War.

The Polish Girl is perfectly paced; starting off with a slow pace to world-build, establish the characters and build relationships between them and then progressing onto something which is fast-paced with lots of tension. I was hooked from the first page and finished the book in a single sitting as I simply couldn’t put it down. Despite being a work of fiction, there’s a lot of historical accuracy in the book through accurate depictions of key historical events, such as the Warsaw Uprising and the experiences of Polish citizens during the Red Army advance into Poland.

All of the characters in The Polish Girl were beautifully complex. We have a really strong female protagonist in Wanda who is a real force to be reckoned with. She’s incredibly clever, passionate, brave and determined and the exploration of her challenging relationship with her mother was a really interesting addition to the story which really added an extra layer to Wanda’s characterisation. In the love story of Wanda and Finn we have a good example of the enemies to lovers trope in the non-traditional sense as Wanda initially misidentifies Finn as her enemy when in fact he’s actually his twin brother. They experience an instant connection and it’s really interesting to see the character of Wanda conflicted between the way she finds herself drawn to him and her feelings of utter hatred towards the man she thinks killed her father.

My track record of instantly falling in love with the love interests in historical romances only continued with the character of Finn, who had me truly captivated from his first entrance into the story. I could give you a long list of quotes from the things he says/does to Wanda which really cemented this and the interactions between him and various children he spends time with during the novel made me just melt. I found the concept of Finn and Stefan following two completely different paths in life, with one joining the Nazi party and one fighting against them, despite being twin brothers really interesting and it’s something which was brilliantly explored.

My one gripe with the character of Finn was that he began to believe that Wanda had betrayed him. This was a complete 360 from his original intense trust in the woman he loves and suddenly moved away from his initial (correct) assumption that Wanda’s disappearance was at the hands of Gerda. Not having any contact with Wanda – or even trying to find out if she survived the war – for so many years seemed completely out of character from the Finn we’d seen for the rest of the novel but I do appreciate that doing this enabled us to have the heart-warming reunion between Finn and Wanda in the closing chapters of the book. I was also slightly infuriated that he’d not had the foresight to use his FBI connections to keep track of his brother but I do appreciate that nobody would have predicted that someone who had committed such atrocities would be released from prison so quickly.

I also did find it slightly unbelievable that Finn could ever capture the mannerisms, speech patterns and behaviours of Stefan (someone he’d not seen for many years) without detection, but this is something that is picked up on by the character of Gerda so it’s a potential plot hole I can let pass. I definitely would have liked for us to have had a chapter which focused on Finn assuming Stefan’s identity and integrating himself into his life and Gestapo role, as I think that was a particularly crucial part of his mission. Seeing how Finn recovered from the potential little slip ups he is likely to have made whilst adjusting to his new persona could have supported the realism of the plotline.

I thought that Gerda (Stefan Keller’s fiancé and the daughter of the man in charge of the Gestapo in Warsaw) was a really well written character who perfectly captured the generation brainwashed by Nazi ideology. Whilst I’m not normally a fan of a last-minute redemption arc for an antagonist, I was really satisfied by the inclusion of this as we did see snippets of good in her character throughout the book and there were hints that she may be beginning to have doubts regarding the ideology being fed to her by the Nazi regime. This was particularly explored through her letters to her mother and I also found the exploration of her experiencing abuse at the hands of both her father and her fiancé to be really interesting.

Although most historical fiction novels end somewhere around the end of the war, The Polish Girl rather uniquely takes us up to 1950. As someone who often finishes novels set in this era craving an insight into how the characters lives played out in the aftermath of the war as Europe started to rebuild and recover, I absolutely loved that Gosia Nealon made the choice to do this. Covering the five years post-war period allowed us to not only explore the post-war lives of the main characters, it also allowed us to get a little update on each of the supporting characters we’d met throughout the narrative. Although I did notice that Mateusz, Wanda’s brother, wasn’t included in this and that was initially confusing, I am predicting this is intentional to not give us any hints towards the second book in the series ‘The Polish Wife’ which will focus more on Mateusz and his love story with Anna.

Overall, The Polish Girl is an incredible historical fiction work which is as heart-warming as it is heart-breaking. It’s fantastically paced and contains gripping moments of real tension which will have readers on the edge of their seats. Fans of World War Two historical fiction will love the story and it’s feature of an Enemies to Lovers romance will also make it a good introduction to the genre for other readers who enjoy the trope. I am eagerly awaiting the publication of the next book in The Secret Resistance series ‘The Polish Wife’ as it will give us an opportunity to return to some of the much-loved characters we met within The Polish Girl.