🍎🍎🍎🍎🍎
With only two prompts left to fill on my Ripped Bodice Summer Bingo, I decided to pick up another one of those. I chose to go with the triplets prompt and was debating between a couple options. Despite being in a contemporary mood lately, I decided I wanted a historical romance. I have a couple of those to read later this month for book clubs, so I wanted to see if I could get myself back in the mood. All said and done, I picked up How to Seduce a Duke by Kathryn Caskie. This is the first book in her Royle Sisters trilogy, based around triplet sisters. Update: I applied this to the prompt of favoritre trope for the 3rd board of Summer of Swoon.
We meet Mary, the eldest of the three Royle triplets. She has had her eye on Viscount Wetherly after passing each other in Hyde Park every Tuesday. She finds out he'll be at a rout next door. She want to show him to her sisters Anne and Elizabeth since she believes they're going to be married. Disguised as statues, they sneak into the neighbor's gardens. Unfortunately, Mary gets found out by the Viscount's older brother Rogan, the Duke of Blackstone. Rogan is very much against marriage and wants to keep both himself and his brother from marrying someone attracted to their fortunes after watching the heartbreak of his father during his second marriage. He believes Mary is a regency era gold-digger and goes about trying to keep her from connecting with his brother.
I absolutely adored this book. First off, it's my favorite trope, wrong sibling. This is also my favorite version of the trope, where the woman thinks she's in love with a brother and the elder brother steps in because he thinks she's not the right person for him. I enjoyed the humor a lot as well. I do have to say, this is not a perfect book and I can see a lot of youtubers and bookstagrammers I follow only giving this a 3 or 4-stars, but I just really adored this. It gave me all the feels but also had some unique parts. The sister grew up knowing that their father wasn't their birth father. However, they come to find out now that they've reached their majority that they might be the daughters of the catholic wife to the Prince Regeant. They are trying to collect the evidence to figure out if the story is true. Now, I understand what the author was trying to do with naming the triplets Mary, Anne and Elizabeth with brown, blonde and red hair. It just felt a little odd. I know that fraternal twins/triplets is a thing, but for all three to have completely different hair colors seemed odd.
I also loved how they were so connected, but they were each so unique and you could really grasp each sister's personality. It also got a little weird with the plot near the end because there were so many twists. Also we find out in the last 50ish pages that Elizabeth has dreams that tell the future. Weird that was thrown in so late. But back to what I loved about the book. You could really feel the connection between Rogan and Mary. There were so many moments where they were messing with each other that had me smiling or chuckling along. The writing was really easy to read and I read this all in one sitting and couldn't put it down.
I love finding new authors and can't wait to get through the rest of the trilogy. I'm really intrigued to see what happens with the mystery of their birth. I'll definitely be picking up the rest of Kathryn Caskie's backlist. She's only published 10 full length novels, so it's an easy backlist to get through. I was looking through to see if she's published anything else or had more plans and saw she passed in 2017. Her obituary mentioned her final book was A Sin in White and published in 2012, but from what I could tell it was never actually published or it was pulled. Not sure what happened there. I'm excited to continue her works and am sad to see she passed after just getting going on her romance career.
Have you read How to Seduce a Duke?
Bookishly Yours,
Stasi🍎
STASTICS: How to Seduce a Duke, Kathryn Caskie, 5-stars, 0 days, paperback, 352 pages, published in 2006
No comments:
Post a Comment