1.5 stars Warning! There will be spoilers for the plot in this review – because I have to pick apart the mediocre plot to fully get my scathe on. Lord Tristan Knight has come into the Earl of Ellington after his estranged father died unexpectedly in a carriage accident. As the late Earl blamed his son for the death of Lady Ellington, stabbed to death by an East End bandit, Tristan has been absent for a long time. His younger sister Emily was left alone […]
Tragedy at war on the high seas
I have a vague memory of one, lonely sentence in my high school history text book declaring the sinking of the Lusitania as one of the reasons the United States eventually joined WWI. The interesting stuff is always in the details, but like most high school history courses, there weren’t any more details. Then I noticed Dead Wake (2015) by Erik Larson. I’d read The Devil in the White City, and even though Larson’s narrative style was sometimes distracting, it was a fascinating story. I figured it […]
Who knew a book about fertilizer could be so interesting?
After reading and enjoying Hager’s Demon Under the Microscope, I was curious about his other work. The Alchemy of Air is about how we made the earth sustain more than 4 billion people by taking nitrogen out of the air and turning it into fertilizer. At the turn of the 20th century, mass starvation was a real threat–the earth simply couldn’t yield enough food to keep up with the growing human population. So chemists are tasked with solving this very, very big problem. Two chemists in particular, […]
Thank you, Beth Ellen, for gifting me an Elizabeth Hoyt I really enjoyed!
St. Giles in the 1730s was one of the most impoverished areas of London. Widowed Mrs. Temperance Dews runs a children’s home for orphaned and foundling children, with the help of her younger brother, Winter Makepeace, who also tutors the boys until they’re old enough to apprentice out. Caring for nearly 30 children between infancy and nine is hard, thankless work and the siblings have trouble making ends meet. They’re in arrears on their rent and facing eviction at any moment. So when the mysterious […]
The film was better (at least in my memory)
Sometime in the first decade of the 20th Century, young Miss Lucy Honeychurch is in Florence with her older, constantly worrying cousin Charlotte Bartlett as companion and chaperone. When they discover that the rooms they’ve been assigned have no nice view, Lucy is disappointed. An older gentleman, Mr. Emerson, offers to trade them, as the rooms he and his son were given have lovely views. “Ladies care about that sort of thing, men do not”. Miss Bartlett is worried about the impropriety of the trade, […]
More like When the Duke was a Terrible Bore. The heroine is good though.
This review was written with the help of Mrs. Julien’s romance review template ™. When the Duke was Wicked is a romance of the “friends to lovers” variety. The hero and heroine have known each other since they were young, as their families are very close. The heroine and the hero’s younger sisters are BFFs. The hero grieves for his dead wife and had determined that he will never love another. The heroine believes she can get the hero to re-join polite society by asking […]
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