ARC Review: A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting by Sophie Irwin (7/12/22)

A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting by Sophie Irwin
Expected Release Date: July 12, 2022


Recommended: YES!
For lots of laughter, for a delicious take on the regency husband-catching story, for a romance you can cheer for, for dramatic scenes full of tension (sexual and dangerous!)

Summary

Kitty Talbot needs a fortune. Or rather, she needs a husband who has a fortune. Left with her father’s massive debts, she has only twelve weeks to save her family from ruin.

Kitty has never been one to back down from a challenge, so she leaves home and heads toward the most dangerous battleground in all of England: the London season.

Kitty may be neither accomplished nor especially genteel—but she is utterly single-minded; imbued with cunning and ingenuity, she knows that risk is just part of the game.

The only thing she doesn’t anticipate is Lord Radcliffe. The worldly Radcliffe sees Kitty for the mercenary fortune-hunter that she really is and is determined to scotch her plans at all costs, until their parrying takes a completely different turn…

Thoughts

Y’all, this book was so good that when I finished it, I wanted to turn back to page one and start it over again immediately. I very nearly did, but I felt like that might be too ridiculous. The first read gave me the pleasure of discovering everything that happened, and I feel like my ensuing second-and-beyond reads will give me the pleasure of anticipating my favorite moments all over again. 🥰

The plot is pretty familiar regency, with a struggling family of girls/young women who need to marry rich to get money to live on (as that’s basically the only option for the time). There are definitely a lot of scenes and moments that lean into that common plotline, most notably in the fact that our leading lady is a kind of buck-the-system woman who goes her own way and is different, bolder than the usual members of the tonne. I’m all for that, so no shade there!

Where it differs, though, is in the specific scenarios they find themselves in, and the way some of the tropes and expectations are turned on their head. I found it super refreshing and really fun to be caught off guard by the way the story was executed!

I thoroughly loved both romantic leads, too. Getting chapters from each of their perspectives (though mostly Kitty’s) really helped with that as I could enjoy hearing each of their thoughts on an interaction and delight in seeing them fall for each other. This is a bit enemies-to-lovers (with some lowkey blackmail?) and I adored it so much. The romance is very sweet, and in keeping with the style of the genre, not a lot of physicality to it. It’s all about the T E N S I O N, babyyy!

Thanks to NetGalley and Viking for a free advanced copy. This is my honest review!