It's deep dive day here at Fated Mates and we're reading an absolute banger of a historical -- Julie Anne Long's fifth Pennyroyal Green book, What I Did for a Duke. We talk about great romance kisses, about age gaps and how they operate in books, about house parties and art and sacrifice and how sexy it is when someone actually sees you for who you are. If you haven't read this one yet, do yourself a favor and do it right now. It's so great.

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The Books

• What I Did for a Duke by Julie Anne Long
• The Pennyroyal Green Series

Show Notes

• The main building you think of when you think of the New York Public Library with the lions is officially called the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. From what I can tell, it didn’t actually have anything to do with Andrew Carnegie, but he did donate $5 million to ensure that the New York Public Library had branch libraries in communities around the city. He also donated a lot of money to other things, that’s a fun thing billionaires used to do. Read more about doing the forbidden kind of “romance stuff” in the library. Jen talked to the New York Public Library's Best New Romance List Committee Co-Chairs Kate Fais and Grace Loiacon back in February.
• In 2022, we recorded our “Break in case of emergency” episode, and it was in fact two sisters, Cait and Kara who requested the episode. PS: We are in emergency. Feel free to break those out  now.
• Julie Anne Long’s The Beast Takes a Bride was on our Best of 2024 episode. What I Did for a Duke is the 5th book in her Pennyroyal Green series. 
• “It must have been a lie,” is what Jen’s grandma Betty used to say if you lost your train of thought and couldn’t remember what you were saying. 
• This is a good speech from Crash Davis, the pitcher played by Kevin Costner in the 1988 movie Bull Durham (also, Nuke says “what’s all that molecule stuff?” which is pretty funny considering the title of this episode).
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston had a Titian exhibition back in 2022 called Women, Myth and Power, and it seems like a thing Genevive would have liked it a lot.