I was pretty sure I was going to hate Regency romance Lady Like by Mackenzi Lee when I started reading it. For one thing, it's written in present tense, for no apparent reason, which is incredibly distracting. For another, very early on heroine Harry steals a dog. Yes, she just outright steals a dog. A well-fed, generally well-behaved dog that is obviously not a stray. No owner comes looking for him. We don't know why. Yes, I am obsessed with this. Don't steal dogs, okay?
I also found Harry's career incredibly annoying. She is a Shakespearean actress in an all-lesbian troupe. She apparently always gets the lead roles. She likes and understands Shakespeare's plays and has integrated them into her thinking about life. But she is a terrible actress, who despite having been in the troupe for years has never gotten better. In fact, the whole troupe is widely acknowledged as awful. Yet the theater seems to be doing just fine. It has a decent audience every night, and this does not appear to be some kind of Rocky Horror situation where people attend to enjoy a camp fellowship. I have enough theater people in my life to find this incredibly annoying and also wildly stupid.
Now that I have those things off my chest: this book told a good story. Heroine Emily is in London hoping to find a husband so she can get out of an engagement to a horrible man. She has a meet cute with a duke, who is Harry's good friend. Although Harry is gay she also wants to marry the duke, because she needs to marry well in order to come into her inheritance. Harry's brother meets Emily and decides that she and Harry would balance each other out and be good influences on each other, so he suggests that they hang out. Plot plot plot HEA.
What I really liked about this book is that as you're reading it you think you know how it's going to end -- how Harry and Emily will manage to have a lesbian relationship while navigating the realities of Regency England. But it doesn't end that way at all. The ending is a little pat, sure, but very, very uplifting.
Now, if Harry would just give the damn dog back to it's actual owner . . .
Note from Jasmine Gold: As the name of this blog indicates, I write erotica. Check out my dark, dystopian novel about naked sex slaves, Mindgames. Your darkest fantasies, with a phenomenal plot and characters you will come to think of as beloved friends. Available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited and in paperback. Or read my book of short stories about hot, consensual sex, The Mature Woman's Guide to Desire, available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.
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