A Lady of Rooksgrave Manor by Kathryn Moon

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The June patreon exclusive review theme for the Smart Women Read Romance was monster romance. A Lady of Rooksgrave Manor by Kathryn Moon was the winning book. This is book one in her Tempting Monsters series and a newer release. This is a reverse harem. Another fun thing to note, this is both a historical romance and a paranormal romance. I was able to apply this to the Summer of Swoon trope outside of comfort zone prompt and the Historical Romance Readathon class difference, indie published, part of a series and one person on the cover prompts.

Esther is a maid at a house that ends up suffering from debt. She is known for being more of a sexually active woman with a lot of desires. When the Dr. Underwood comes to take care of the lady of the house, Esther likes to eavesdrop. One time, Dr. Underwood catches her. When she doesn't have employment anymore, he suggests she try coming to the Rooksgrave Manor. A sort of personalized brothel for monsters. The witch Magdelena that runs this house reads auras and helps match a woman with the monster(s) that would fit with them. She also provides a sense of security for the ladies and works with the monsters and ladies to make sure they have everything they need.

Esther, as I mentioned before, has a very high sex drive and it feels like was made to be in this house. She ends up putting together a harem with a sphinx, vampire, Dr. Underwood (a kind of jekyll & hyde), marble golem and invisible man. This book is very steamy and honestly felt more like erotica to me than a romance. That could just be my struggle with multiple partner relationships. I've always struggled with ménages and poly relationships, so this is the first harem I've read. While I did like the emphasis placed on the equality of everyone in Esther's harem and how adamant she was that she only felt complete with everyone there, I still struggled believing she was in love with everyone. There a lot of sexy times and I found myself at about 40% just starting to skim it. While I enjoy steam, this definitely felt more erotica with almost constant sex on the page. If Esther wasn't participating in it herself, I felt like she was watching other people have it.

There are a lot of kinks in this book and I can see a lot of people enjoying this. The biggest one I had an issue with was all of the voyeurism. Esther really enjoyed being watched and I'm not into that. At all. I did like the reasoning behind why she enjoyed it though, that she was showing that monsters could find someone to accept them as they are and crave to be with them. I really like how Esther made it point throughout to show that monsters needed love (and loving) too. I did feel for some of the other monsters that were just there but not actively cared for in many ways by their women. That's were I'm struggling with rating this book. Objectively, this would be a 4 or 5-star. The writing is well done and if you're looking for monster smut, this hits it out of the park. My enjoyment though was a complete roller coaster and I feel like closer to a 3-star. Honestly, I kept wanting Amon, the sphinx, to steal Esther from the others and taker her for himself. I was really intrigued by the mythos. I think the world building and reasoning behind of the kink makes me lean towards a 3.5-star rating, but I'll round up to 4 on goodreads. I mainly rate on my enjoyment, so it's hard for me to knock it too much because I knew what I was getting into beforehand.

I will probably read more of the series when it's out and when I'm in the mood. I hope one of the books is a single couple. It's just what I prefer, possessive alphas. I think that there are a lot of different kinds of stories that could be told with the world that Kathryn Moon set up and I hope she goes that route instead of them being mostly the same trope. I'm certainly intrigued. It was interesting to see what everyone else thought about it on the live show last night. This kind of book always seems to get varied opinions, which makes for fun conversations.

Have you read A Lady of Rooksgrave Manor?

Bookishly Yours,

Stasi🍎

STATISTICS: A Lady of Rooksgrave Manor, Kathryn Moon, 4-stars, eBook, 379 pages, published in 2021