Apparently, I am doing a lot of “guilty pleasure” reading this summer. Well…in between my YA reads and my anti-racist reading. Here is one that I liked. Didn’t love.

Am I hard to please? Well, no, but I have read over 3000 books in my 32 years and it is hard to really surprise me with a plot. I almost feel like I have read it all before. That means I hardly ever really “love” a book, but I usually still “like” it.

Please read my previous and future reviews with that in mind.

Bringing Down the Duke

Bringing Down the Duke, to frequent readers of historical romance, has a familiar plot. Beautiful, but too intelligent to land a husband, Annabelle Archer (love an alliterative name) crosses paths with handsome but cold and aloof Sebastian Devereux, Duke of Montgomery while she is handing out fliers in support of women’s suffrage. After that, you. know what happens.

This one was fun and steamy. I loved the build up of tension and the back drop of the British women’s suffrage movement. That was a new one. It is great when a main heroine asserts her intelligence, but loved to see her using it to affect change for a larger group of people, rather than just her own place in society.

What kept me from loving it was this: I’m not a huge fan of the “woman getting a fever from being out in the cold so they have to stay at the aloof, heartless, handsome aristocrat’s manor” trope. But it’s always a pretty convenient way to advance a romantic plot. Come on. I get it, but I would have loved something more.

With that being said, I did enjoy my experience reading it last night and I will absolutely pick up Evie Dunmore’s next one.