Blog Tour Book Review: The Duke's Temptation by Raven McAllan

Author: Raven McAllan
Series: N/A
Audience: +18
Genre: Historical Romance, Erotic Romance
Publisher: Totally Bound
Release Date: October 31st 2017
My Rating: 5 Cups
Source: Neverland Blog Tours
Blurb (from Goodreads):

Tortured duke Gibb Alford has vowed never to love again...until a beautiful French knife thrower brings him to his knees.

When Gibb Alford, Duke of Menteith, saves a beautiful French knife thrower from the unwanted attentions of a fellow aristocrat he is ill-prepared for the immediate tug of attraction to the beautiful Evangeline. Widowed, he has sworn off love forever, so he can well do without this temptation.

Evangeline certainly doesn’t want the complication of being in the sights of one smoky-eyed Scottish duke. She’s a lady on a mission, with no time for love or dalliance.

However, fate and life have other plans and gradually Gibb and Evangeline become a couple.

As each struggle with the demons of their pasts, Evangeline finds life in the ton difficult. The spurned aristocrat Gibb saved her from is not prepared to give in and retire gracefully. And while Gibb fights the man, he also declares war on his own emotions. When Evangeline’s past is revealed to her, everything changes. She has a decision to make.

Fight for Gibb—or flee to a safe but unfulfilled future.

As for her duke… All is fair in love and war—right?

*Disclaimer: I received an eARC of this book from Neverland Blog Tours in exchange for an honest review. This does not influence my rating or the content of my review

It's been a while since I last read a historical romance that I loved as much as I did this one.

I had so much fun reading this book. Gibb is a tortured hero, who has vowed never to love again after his wife died. Fortunately for him, emotions have a funny way of sneaking up on you when you least expect it, and he is saved from his self-imposed solitude when he meets Evangeline. I quite liked Gibb. I loved how forward he was with his thinking, even though it is amazing how few people understood his quite reasonable ideas. I liked how he respected his staff, how he pushed them towards getting an education, and I liked how he defended Evangeline when she needed to be defended. I also liked how, towards the end of the book, he started fighting with his demons and tried to come to terms with how his late wife was like and with what she did.

Evangeline is an interesting heroine. She wasn't interested in anything other than what Gibb was willing to offer, but also nothing less than what she deserved. I liked how she stood up for herself, both when she needed to defend herself from Crowe, but also when she decided she deserved more from Gibb and had that conversation with him. I loved seeing her do that. I also loved how independent she was, how she wanted to earn her living. She's also a woman on a mission, trying to find out who her father is, and I liked that aspect of the story. In some ways, she reminded me of Elizabeth Bennet, which is one of my favorite heroines ever.

While reading this book I felt like reading a classic book. I was so immersed in the storytelling, that it took me a while to remember that this is a brand new book. Which is amazing, because it takes a special kind of author (or magician, however you want to put it) to manage to make the old English sound so new and not difficult to read or understand. I was truly amazed by McAllan's ability to write a story using words I've never heard before, without taking away from the story. It actually made the story more vibrant, more real, easier to get lost in, which I adored.

It's been a while since I last read a historical romance book, but this one reminded me why I fell in love with the genre in the first place. If you love the genre as much as I do, you must read this book. McAllan's writing took me on a wonderful journey and I cannot wait to read more of her stories.

Book Review: Cupid's Match by Lauren Palphreyman

Author: Lauren Palphreyman
Series: Cupid's Match #1
Audience: +16
Genre: YA, Fantasy, Paranormal
Publisher: Self-Published
Release Date:
My Rating: 3.5 cups
Source: Wattpad
Blurb (from Goodreads):

In a world where everyone has a perfect match, what if you were matched with the dangerous, notoriously good looking, original bad boy....Cupid himself?

***
Dear Lila,
I am contacting you on behalf of The Cupids Matchmaking Service.

You will not have heard of us but we are an organisation that work behind the scenes of society, identifying each person's perfect match.

Usually we would not contact our clients. We prefer to work in secrecy - setting up the ideal environment for the two matches to have a chance encounter.

Recently, however, we ran your details through our system and...well....in your case...

We think you'd better come in.

Please respond at your earliest convenience.

Yours Urgently,

The Cupids Matchmaking Service

I think we all know by now I love books inspired by mythology. I probably said it so many times y'all are bored and annoyed already, but it's true. I love them. I read Cupid's Match on Wattpad when I hit a bit of a reading slump phase, and it was the perfect book to get me out of it.

The story focuses on the idea that each person has a destined partner, a so-called match. The Cupids Matchmaking Services organization is basically the name given to a group of cupids that have heen around since the beginning of time. As per the company rules, no cupid can find his or her match, it is forbidden. So what happens if this rule is broken and a cupid does find his match? Enter Lila, a regular teenager that finds herself matched to the Cupid, and all hell breaks loose.

I really enjoyed the idea of love being forbidden to the very creatures whose entire existence is dependent on love. It was an interesting aspect of the story, and it was a fun, new thing to do with the myth of love. I also liked how this was explained. For me it felt like a truly selfish reason from the organization's boss to have such a rule, because it meant that this person wasn't in the business of love for selfless reasons, but for the feeling of power that comes from playing with human emotions, but also from feeling loved by humans and served by cupids. The concept of love in this book is seen from many perspectives, from what some refer to as true love, to obsession, to adulation, all the way to envy and hate. So you get the positive and negative aspects of love, and I liked reading about that.

Lila was an enjoyable character to read about. At times she was a bit difficult to like though, probably because she was a bit too naive. And she was a bit undecided with what she wanted. I did like her spunk at the beginning of the story, when she refused to believe in the idea of an appointed, already decided-on match for her. While she had courage, I would have wanted to see her keep a bit more of that initial spark during the story. She kind of got it back towards the end of the story.

Cupid was depicted in an interesting way in this story. I got the idea of him more as a rebel here than a true bad boy, to be honest. He has a brother in this story, Cal, which I found insanely funny for some reason. There were moments when you could see a glimpse of Cupid's wild streak, but I didn't truly got a feeling of him as a full on bad boy.

There were a few details that I would have wanted to be more accurate in this story, at least from a mythological perspective. But all of that aside, as I said before, I really enjoyed seeing how the whole concept of love was depicted in this story. The villain in this story is pretty psychotic if you ask me. It's not that this particular villain is full on scary, just more deranged I'd say.

The plot was pretty evenly paced. One little technical thing that kept me from reading this story faster was the way it was put into pages. I don't know how this story translates to printed page or if a true ebook version of it is the same, but at least on Wattpad it felt as if the chapters were too short. I would have wanted longer, and therefore fewer chapters, just because the sudden breaks in reading with getting past the in-between posts kind of pulled me out of the story more than I liked.

All of that aside, I quite enjoyed this story. There were a few things that were left open-ended, and I hope this will be resolved in the other stories from this series. I am planning on reading the sequels, just because I am curious to see what happens to the secondary characters from this story. All in all, a pretty enjoyable read.

Mini Reviews: The DNF Edition: Things I Want My Daughters To Know, Portrait Of A Killer, Ella, Dracula, The Strange Journey Of Mr Daldry

Hey guys! I promised I was going to find my courage to write some DNF reviews HOLD ME and today is the perfect day for it. One of the bookstagram challenges I signed up for this month has a prompt for today that's about books you didn't finish, so here we are. So without further ado, here are some books I didn't finish.

A post shared by Ruby Jo (@rubys.books) on Oct 24, 2017 at 7:32am PDT

• Things I Want My Daughters To Know by Elizabeth Noble

To be honest, this book deserves more to be in the "put aside for now" pile. The story focuses four sisters trying to recover from the death of their mother in the present time, while also telling the story of the mother and her fight with cancer and, eventually, how she simply tries to come to terms with the idea that she can't win the battle, so she decides to write a journal, if I'm not mistaken, for her daughters to read after her death. The story is compelling and it certainly isn't my first foray into the world of sad, heartbreaking books where one of the MCs dies of cancer. But at the time I picked it up, without really thinking about it consciously, really, my grandma was fighting her battle with cancer. So I didn't manage to keep my distance from the story enough for it to not become a painful reading experience, so I felt the need to put it down. It doesn't mean I didn't enjoy what little I read, it just means I needed to step back a little bit from the story. I will definitely pick it up later to read.

• Portrait of a Killer by Patricia Cornwell

I've always been attracted to books or documentaries that focus on unsolved crime mysteries, and there's no bigger mystery to me than Jack the Ripper. I expected greatness from this book, to be honest. The thing that kept me from fully enjoying the book was that I felt like I spent too much time in the author's head, with her focusing a bit too much on her own journey and thoughts during and about this investigation. It's not my first time reading nonfiction about serial killers and unsolved mysteries, but they all managed to somehow not include too much detail about the author. I would have wanted less of that, to be honest.

• Ella, Dracula by Javier García-Sánchez

This book is about Elizabeth Bathory, one of the bloodiest serial killers ever in my opinion. Which got me excited, because as a psychologist, I love delving into the minds of the darkest human creatures that have lived on this planet. I read this book way, way before I stated book blogging, so I might not remember the finer details as much, but from what I remember the story is told from a male protagonist's perspective, who knew the countess from when he was a boy and was afraid of her, and he tries to tell this story of the bloody countess. That's really all I remember. While this would seem like such an interesting story, I couldn't get past the first 30 pages or so. First of all, I don't know if this was the way the book was written as in the original language, but the translated version was a bit too flowery for my taste. There were some metaphors there that killed me, and not in a good way. But my biggest issue was with the way the author portrayed my country's ancestors. I usually can manage to distance myself from any personal thoughts while reading, so when a book bothers me, it really bothers me. I myself was... I won't say offended, because that's a too strong word, but bothered by the way the Dacians were portrayed (if you don't know, the Dacians are the ancient people who inhabited the territory that is today known as Romania; Dacia was a bit bigger than today's Romania, but that's not the point here). Why the author felt the need to even mention Dacians in a book about a Hungarian countess is beyond me, honestly, and I'm sure they get as much page space in the overall book as a dedication page, but the little that was written bothered me. I understand challenging history, since we know history is written by winners, therefore is not always accurate, but this didn't feel like that. Maybe I exaggerated, but to me it proved to be too much and I couldn't continue reading.

ETA: I feel the need to add this one phrase again, just to make sure nobody got me wrong. I wasn't offended by what was said, but mostly by how it was said in this book. I understand how, if you've read the book, or if you want to, you might misunderstand me and accuse me of something I'm not. It's not about what was implied here, but about the how. 

• The Strange Journey of Mr Daldry by Marc Levy

This book is the most painful of them all. Marc Levy is one of my favorite authors, and I was excited when this book came out, because it felt different than all his previous books. The story takes place a few years after WWII and it's about Alice, who gets her fortune told. She then moves into this apartment that has, according to her neighbor, Mr Daldry, "the best lighting he needed for his paintings". He then somehow convinces her to listen to the fortune teller, and go on a journey. That's the short version of where I got into reading the book. I started reading the book all excited, and halfway through I realized I misinterpreted just about everything about this Mr. Daldry, so much so that I was convinced I was reading about an old guy. Which made sense to me, because the way he talks, the way he acts, even his way of thinking, all made me imagine an 80 year old guy. For some reason I just couldn't connect with the characters, and for me that is just as important as the plot itself.

Okay, so this might not be as painful as I originally thought. Let's discuss. What book did you recently DNF and why?