Unlike Balogh’s other books I’ve read, I didn’t think this one was 50 pages too long. Instead, he is a “small, slight, golden man.” He was beat up as a kid because of his size, and found martial arts to protect himself.

Of course! The twist in this one is that the Duke isn’t tall, dark and handsome. When he dies, her true parentage is revealed, and she unwillingly becomes an aristocrat too. She is brought into the circle of the Duke of Netherby because, it turns out, her father himself was an aristocrat. In this one, we have Anna Snow, a teacher at an orphanage where she was once an orphan herself. Which brought me to the stack of Balough’s books on my shelf. When I started to feel better, I tried picking up a book to read but started and stopped four different ones. Two weekends ago, I had a brush with hypothermia (I went out running early to beat the rain, and I didn’t) and couldn’t focus on anything more than Donald Duck cartoons. I’ve said this before, but I’ll sometimes buy three or four books in a romance series just to have on hand for when I need them. Which is how I once again selected a Mary Balogh book, this time Someone to Love, the first book in the Westcott series ( Book 39 of 52 of 2022 was also a Westcott book). The same is with romance novels: knowing there’s a happy ending is one of the reasons I sometimes pick one up. You don’t go into reading a crime novel thinking you won’t find out who did it in the end.

What I wanted to say (but didn’t, because I am already too online) is that the predictability is the point. I saw a recent tweet complaining that romance novels are boring because they’re predictable.

Mary balogh someone to love