Add on being behind the trend (I only read it this year) and let's just say I was bracing myself. I was fairly late to reading queer romance, so the idea of picking up A Seditious Affair (2015) by KJ Charles was already daunting. But the more a hype a book gets the more reluctant I am to read it - what if it doesn't live up to the hype? Sometimes a romance novel will sweep onto the scene and suddenly it feels like everyone has read it. This is the second book in K.J Charles' Society of Gentlemen trilogy. This latter quality is often referred to as having an HEA (Happily Ever After) or HFN (Happily For Now). The Duke and I is a historical romance novel - meaning it is set 50 years or more prior to its publication and follows the key 'rules' of the romance genre: the romantic relationship is central to the plot of the novel, and it ends with a sense of emotional justice or satisfaction.

(The new Netflix tie-in cover probably isn't helping.) Loadingīut for fans of the show who have picked up the show's source text, Julia Quinn's novel The Duke and I, for the first time, it's been a shock to discover that not only is the Duke of Hasting white, so are all the other characters. It's one of the reasons Shonda Rhimes's series Bridgerton is so interesting the show imagines an alternate version of Regency-era London, one that includes Black and Brown people in the aristocracy.Īnd with 82 million households tuning in, it has become Netflix's biggest ever series.

At different points of time, certain types of love (interracial and/or same-sex relationships for instance) have been viewed as lesser, treated as illegitimate or been outright illegal. Likewise, whose stories of love we tell are political.

Shonda rhimes book list