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: Fake Dates and Mooncakes by Sher Lee*

 *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: Fake Dates And Mooncakes
Author: Sher Lee
Genre: LGBTQIA+ Young Adult
Trigger warnings:  Death Of A Parent
Rating: ★★★★★ 

Fake-dates, mooncakes and rich people problems. But love wasn't meant to be on the menu . . .

Meet Dylan Tang: he juggles school and delivery runs for his aunt’s struggling Chinese takeout in Brooklyn. Winning a mooncake competition could bring the publicity they need to stay afloat.

Enter Theo Somers: a charming, wealthy customer who convinces Dylan to be his fake date to a family wedding full of crazy rich drama. Their romance is supposed to be just for show . . . but soon Dylan’s falling for Theo. For real.

With the mooncake contest looming, Dylan can’t risk being distracted by rich-people problems. Can he save his family’s business and follow his heart – or will he fail to do both?

Fake Dates and Mooncakes is a fantastic queer romance debut from Sher Lee. As the title suggests, it is the fake-dating story of our two male protagonists Dylan and Theo and the narrative utilises other well-loved romance tropes such as only one bed, instant connection and the couple coming from different worlds. Through this, Sher Lee has created a charming and wholesome queer romance which was so easy to read in a single sitting and had me smiling from ear to ear.

Dylan and Theo were both fantastic protagonists who were beautifully written as realistic teenagers. I loved their instant connection and Theo’s charm and flirtatious nature will make you swoon. The supporting characters were all wonderful too. I fell in love with Dylan’s family and it was fantastic to have a diverse family type represented within YA fiction as Dylan lives with his aunt and cousins following the death of his mother.

The book is also a love letter to Chinese culture, particularly Chinese street food as Dylan is an aspiring chef working for the family takeout business and taking part in a local mooncake competition. The impact of grief was also beautifully explored through Dylan and Theo connecting over having both lost their mothers.

This book has been marketed as ‘Heartstopper meets Crazy Rich Asians’ and that couldn’t be more spot on. If you are looking for a cute and easy to read queer romance packed full of your favourite tropes, look no further than Fake Dates and Mooncakes. This was an incredible debut from Sher Lee and I’m so looking forward to reading more from them. 

Review: A Missing Connection by Dani McLean*

 *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: A Missing Connection
Author: Dani McLean
Genre: Romance Novella

Trigger warnings:  Sexually explicit scenes

Rating: ★★★★

A Missing Connection is the latest fun and flirty romance novella from Dani McLean. It’s the third instalment of her ‘Movie Magic Novella’ series but all of the novellas can be read as standalone stories and this was my first venture into both the series and the author.

The book tells the story of Beau – the extremely wealthy sole heir to his father’s business empire – and April – a woman working in STEM who comes from a large family background. They both feel in a rut in their lives, particularly when it comes to dating, but one day they realise they can speak telepathically to one another. As months go by of them speaking to each other day and night, they really open up to each other and build an anonymous relationship of flirtation, encouragement and deep understanding (with quite a lot of dirty talk thrown in for good measure).

This beautifully crafted love story is short and sweet but really packs a punch. It’s really nice to see a love story where they connect on an emotional level first and their instant chemistry was perfect. A Missing Connection is a real cutesy romance and although it has all of the inner-workings of a cheesy hallmark movie, it also has some fantastically written spicy scenes and the bathtub seen was HOT!

I was hesitant that the length of the story would limit my opportunity to build a connection with the characters but this was not a problem at all as Dani McLean writes such fantastic characters and achieves such depth to them despite a limited wordcount. Both April and Beau are such wonderful, loveable characters with impeccable banter that it was quite hard to work out which one of them I fancied more.

Although it’s only a novella, the story manages to go beyond the romance and also looks at the inner-workings of both April and Beau’s families. I would have a liked a little more exploration of Beau’s relationship with his father as it was resolved a little too cleanly for my liking but I do appreciate that we were limited on page space.

I fell in love with the setting (particularly the market) and the descriptions of the vibrant community. The scene where they finally met for the first time had me beaming from ear to ear and I really enjoyed the epilogue and the quick insight it gave into how their lives and relationship had progressed after meeting in person.

I would advise going into this book not expecting any explanation for the fantastical telepathic connection element. But, despite not being an avid reader of the fantasy genre, this didn’t really bother me and I just enjoyed the magic element of the romance, interpreting the telepathic link to be the universe’s way of connecting soulmates.

A Missing Connection is perfect for anyone who’s after a quick charming love story with a bit of spice and a whole lot of heart.

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.