Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Women were to stay out of it. Whatever *it* was.”

My Inconvenient Duke by Loretta Chase

by Leave a Comment

The third in Chase’s Difficult Dukes series. This book is so quintessentially Chase that if you fed it to AI (and someone probably has), it could probably produce a roughly believable original story just based on this book. Plot: Lady Alice is the sister of the Duke of Ripley, which readers may recall from A Duke in Shining Armor. Ripley’s recklessness has now been tamed by an intelligent, headstrong woman, but this was not always the case. At one point, Alice felt that Ripley would […]

Less inconvenient and more just plain busy duke

My Inconvenient Duke by Loretta Chase

by Leave a Comment

I always look forward to Loretta Chase because there is something about her novels that is just entertaining, even when they get ridiculous. My favorite of hers is probably Mr. Impossible (it’s just the personality of Thor in Thor: Ragnarok meets The Mummy) though I also quite enjoy her Dressmakers series. Overall, I have enjoyed her Difficult Dukes series though this is the weakest of the 3. The first half of the book reads very much like a classic romance novel, and then the second […]

We finally get Alice and Blackwood’s story

My Inconvenient Duke by Loretta Chase

by Leave a Comment

Nowhere Book Bingo 25: A book that takes place entirely outside the US Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC. My views are my own. Spoiler warning! Because some of the issues I have with this book can’t really be addressed without me spoiling some parts of the plot, skip the parts of the review on my website that I’ve marked with spoiler tags until you’ve actually finished the book. While this is the third book in the series, most of the action takes place […]

Bonus: Ridiculous 1830s Fashion

Dukes Prefer Blondes by Loretta Chase

by 4 Comments

Five series and 28 or so books into a very successful career, it comes as no surprise that Loretta Chase is a really consistent historical romance author who provides great entertainment value combined with sincere emotional connections. I loved Dukes Prefer Blondes when I reviewed it for Cannonball Read in 2016 during Romancelandia’s Year of Difficult Men*  and I adore it  now. I went back to revisit a specific scene and the next thing I knew, I’d re-read to the end and then gone back […]

I have a mental block about this book and it defeated me.

Miss Wonderful (The Carsington Brothers, #1) by Loretta Chase

by 2 Comments

I first tried to read this book several years back on e-book, which I had checked out from the library. I had it out for months and never got past a third of the way through. I resigned myself to trying again later. Later came in March of this year because I wanted to get back into Loretta Chase, and this book was standing in my way. I got my hands on a physical copy and commenced reading. I started from the beginning, and things […]

Grouping two more re-reads together, with no thematic connection

His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik

The Last Hellion by Loretta Chase

by Leave a Comment

Re-read, October 2022: I cannot fully explain why I had the need to re-read this novel, the start of a promising but eventually disappointing series of alt-history books that asked the question, what if Napoleonic wars but also dragons? A decent part was this intense desire to re-read the part of the novel where Laurence realizes that a number of dragons that the UK relies upon for its aerial might insist on having female captains, and is forced to reconcile that fact with his posh […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo