Books
Finished reading: Tangled Up In You by Christina Lauren 📚
A super cute Tangled retelling!
📚 Book Review: A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke by Adriana Herrera
A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke by Adriana Herrera is a historical romance set mostly in Paris during the 1889 Exposition Universelle, about a Dominican-Mexican doctor and the duke who falls for her. On the closed door/open door/in the room/in the bed heat scale, this book puts you in the bed with the main characters. Here’s the publisher’s description of the book:
Physician Aurora Montalban Wright takes risks in her career, but never with her heart. Running an underground women’s clinic exposes her to certain dangers, but help arrives in the unexpected form of the infuriating Duke of Annan. Aurora begrudgingly accepts his protection, then promptly finds herself in his bed. New to his role as a duke, Apollo César Sinclair Robles struggles to embrace his position. With half of society waiting for him to misstep and the other half looking to discredit him, Apollo never imagined that his enthralling bedmate would become his most trusted adviser. Soon, he realizes the rebellious doctor could be the perfect duchess. But Aurora won’t give up her independence, and her secrets make her unsuitable for the aristocracy. When a dangerous figure from their past returns to threaten them, Apollo whisks Aurora away to his villa in the French Riviera. Far from the reproachful eye of Parisian society, can Apollo convince Aurora that their bond is stronger than the forces keeping them apart?
What I loved
This is the third book in Adriana Herrera’s Las Léonas trilogy, and I have loved every book in the series. Herrera gives us three best friends, each having her own adventure. By the time it’s Aurora’s turn to be the heroine, her friends Luz Alana and Manuela have found their own partners and the circle of the three friends has expanded to include Luz Alana’s husband, Evan, and Manuela’s partner, Cora. Evan and Cora often serve as a Greek chorus for the hero, Apollo, and it’s delightful.
Apollo himself is an incredibly dreamy hero. Aurora has been running herself ragged tending to patients both night and day. She has neglected her own needs. Apollo notices her taking care of others and not taking care of herself, and takes it upon himself to take care of her.
Aurora is a fierce doctor, the first woman licensed to practice medicine in Mexico, collaborating with colleagues in Paris to establish a network of women’s clinics. She dedicates herself to her work. Her growing attraction to Apollo gets her out of her head and into her body.
Adriana Herrera always gives us a delightful cast of supporting characters and here she gives us Brazilian boxing club owner Gilberto and his Vietnamese partner Minh, whose mother farms lavender in the French countryside. Apollo’s body man, Jean-Louis, is a giant who Apollo appoints to escort Aurora on dangerous night patient visits but whom Aurora quickly wins over to doing what she asks more than what Apollo does.
I feel like I’m not doing the book justice here.
Adriana Herrera writes love scenes that tie the emotional and physical relationships of the main characters to each other in a way that both titillates and tugs at heartstrings. The more Aurora and Apollo get to know each other, the more each of them impresses the other with their commitment to helping the people they serve: patients in Aurora’s case, and tenants in the duchy in Apollo’s case.
Romance readers love a broken character, and I especially love the way Aurora is broken, the way she is constantly fighting to prove her worth while also caring deeply for her patients.
What I wanted more of
I found myself lingering over this text rather than devouring it, I think because I didn’t want Las Léonas to end. There’s nothing I wish Adriana Herrera would have included in this book that she didn’t. I just hope she keeps writing historicals.
What I need to warn you about.
The clinics where Aurora works offer services that were perfectly legal in Paris in 1889, but also those that were not, especially contraceptive services and abortions. Abortions and abortion aftercare are discussed in the book. Herrera has a note about this at the beginning of the book, so definitely look at an ebook preview or the first few pages of a physical copy to read that. Aurora is put in physical danger and there is reference to poor treatment at the hands of a peer in her past as well as reference to the same peer continuing this behavior in the book’s present.
Who should read this book
Lovers of historical romance. People who want a historical romance that isn’t set in England or during the Regency. Readers who want to see fierce Afro-Latina women defying the limitations society tries to put on them and finding love. Readers who love found family.
Book: A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke Author: Adriana Herrera Publisher: Canary Street Press Publication Date: February 4, 2025 Pages: 432 Age Range: Adult Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley, Purchase
Finished reading: A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke by Adriana Herrera 📚
I love this book. Full review soon!
Finished reading: Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey 📚
A fascinating book about what our ghosts say about us.
📚💬📝 “Tending to your body and mind is a way to tend to your work.” Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice
📚💬📝 “A disabled life is a life interrupted.” Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice
Finished reading: An Island Princess Starts a Scandal by Adriana Herrera 📚
Another re-read. I basically cried through the last two chapters.
📚💬 “In that moment Manuela began counting her blessings to have found friends who not only came to the rescue but who knew there was no problem in life one could not tackle armed with good cheese and champagne.” Adriana Herrera, An Island Princess Starts a Scandal
📚💬 “Ghost stories, for good or ill, are how cities make sense of themselves: how they narrate the tragedies of their last, weave cautionary tales for the future.“Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
Finished reading: A Caribbean Heiress in Paris by Adriana Herrera 📚
This is a re-read. It’s a testament to Adriana Herrera’s work that even though it’s only six months since I originally read it, I found this riveting and didn’t want to skip or skim at all.
Finished reading: Firelight by Sophie Jordan 📚
📚💬 “…surely ghosts will follow wherever there is bad record keeping.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “Here, then, is a central paradox in the way that ghosts work: to turn the living into ghosts is to empty them out, rob them of something vital; to keep the dead alive as ghosts is to fill them up with memory and history, to keep alive a thing that would otherwise be lost.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, writing about the dissonance between Richmond’s history as the home of slave trade and torture and the fact that all Richmond’s ghosts are white 👻
Finished reading: Kiss the Girl by Zoraida Córdova 📚
This is such a perfect move of Disney’s The Little Mermaid to contemporary romance. There is so much perfection to be had here, such magic work taking movie moments and making them part of our world. If you’re an Ariel person, you should read it.
Finished reading: By the Book by Jasmine Guillory 📚
A sweet Beauty and the Beast retelling.
North Carolinians, use this tool from EveryLibrary to contact your state senator about H636, a bill that “threatens student rights, undermines local control of school libraries, and risks costly censorship battles across the state.” I’ll try to do a detailed breakdown of the bill soon. 📚
📚💬 “The contemporary attitude toward Spiritualism as a particularly ridiculous belief stems in no small part from the misogyny with which it was attacked in the second half of the nineteenth century.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “Ghosts, you could say, flock to women left alone.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “Even though the soles of her feet felt like she was walking on broken glass, she glided across the greenroom and stood face-to-face with her father.” Zoraida Córdova bringing a little Hans Christian Andersen to her Disney-inspired Little Mermaid romance retelling, Kiss the Girl 🧜♀️
📚💬 “Live in a house for any length of time, and you make it your own memory palace.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “Uncomfortable truths, buried secrets, disputed accounts: ghost stories side out of the shadowlands, a response to the ambiguous and poorly understood.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “Those aspects of a life that are discontinuous, fragmented, or unexpected, are made whole through the ghost story.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “A haunted house is a memory palace made real: a physical space that retains memories that might otherwise be forgotten or that might remain only in fragments.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “The past we’re most afraid to speak aloud of in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻