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Lords For Love*
Uneven Set of Books
This box set contains three books written by two different authors. Eliza Keaton writes the first two, and Charlotte Fitzwilliam writes the last one. Side note: That has to be a pseudonym for a fan of Jane Austen and perhaps Jane Austen fanfiction. Charlotte, of course, is a key character in Pride and Prejudice, and Fitzwilliam is, of course, the first name of Mr. Darcy and the last name of his cousin.
Both authors are new to me. The first book, The Duke’s Baby, I found to be a little unusual, but in a good way, because the hero and heroine are childhood friends, but their relationship does not come to fruition as soon as they become adults. Rather, he married another woman and had a child with her. So the romance part of the book springs from the time when the Duke is dealing with his grief, the heroine’s mother is suffering from ill health, and the heroine is trying to do her best to help them. I quite enjoyed this first book.
I was not as enamored of the second book by the same author. I felt like she spent too much time with the stories and imagination flights of the heroine, so much so that we didn’t really get to know the hero until the end. The romance was not center stage like it should be in a love story.
I enjoyed the story of the third and final book in this set except for one crucial thing. This is a story where parents try to force their children into marriage, but neither is interested outwardly. So they had to fight a growing attraction, which was fun to watch as it is clear that they are well suited to each other. Unfortunately, I was very distracted by the strange formatting in the book. In parts of it, the first few words of a new paragraph were capitalized, making it seem like the characters were always shouting the first bits of dialogue at each other. In an early section, too, the paragraph breaks weren’t done correctly, making many of them run together, which made for awkward reading. This did clear up some in the middle of the book, but then it returned. I did receive an ARC of this book, so this may have been corrected by the time it actually is published. As this is the last book in the collection, I couldn’t see if this had been fixed before publication.
So on the whole, I found this to be an uneven set of books. By the way, these are clean Regencies, if that matters to you.