Recently Amazon suggested a Sarah MacLean book to me when I was browsing through Christina Dodd's offerings. I love Christina Dodd's historical romance and have been missing them now that she's seemingly switched to contemporary romance. I decided it was time to give a few new authors a chance. 
 I grabbed the last book in Ms. MacLean's Love by the Numbers series, Eleven Scandals to Start to Win a Duke's Heart. I instantly loved it. It was well written with what I've come to believe are accurate details for the period. The characters were engaging. The dialogue fresh. The story itself - snobbish aristocrat ultimately falling for the inappropriate woman - wasn't bad. Not my favorite but easy enough to read through thanks to the heroine's spirited personality. I especially loved how she had the habit of conjugating verbs in Latin when she was upset. 
 So impressed was I that I got the first book in the trio, Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake. I was immediately drawn into this book because the heroine isn't a perfect beauty like Juliania in the third book. The story of a wallflower capturing the interest of a rake is always a good read. And so it was. The idea of a Victorian wallflower's bucket list was charming (not that its called this in the book). Any excuse to put a good girl in breaches during a period book, right? 
 However when I reached the middle book, Ten Ways to Be Adored When Landing a Lord, I realized that these three stories shared too many similarities for my taste. I do feel that I must point out that the first two books chronicle male twins and so it's understandable, perhaps, that they should go about things similarly. However the last book is about a family acquaintance - a Duke no less - who is at once a friend to one of the twins and an enemy to the other. Yet the similarities appear here as well. 
 The love scenes of these three follow much the same pattern. Since this is a review, I'll spare you the gory details, but after reading three back-to-back, I felt that the love scene portions of these three books were done with a formula. As if the author sighed when she arrived at them, looked at her schedule of what was to happen when and then plopped in the appropriate scene - tweaking as needed to accommodate the particular characters in that book. I'm sure that isn't what happened at all but it does begin to feel like that after reading them back to back. 
 Some of the dialogue in the love scenes in particular seems to be repeated. All three heroines have the initially charming habit of gasping out words in the heat of passion without finishing them, e.g. "I -" "Nick - " "I don't - " "Please - " But after three books of this, the charming habit becomes annoying. More than one of these males commands their women not to hide themselves from him. More than one crows his oral prowess with something akin to: If you liked that, you'll love this. There were other similarities here but I'm having trouble recalling them now because, as my other half enjoys saying: "I've slept since then." 
 The terms of endearment used in the three books were also similar. Callie's is "empress" - so named after her full name's namesake Calpurnia. Juliana's was "siren" because Simon is convinced she's bewitched him. And Isabel is "Voluptas" - the name of one of the marble statues she's brought Nick to value. 
 However at least once you can catch Nick referring to Isabel as a siren. The siren theme also appears in the first book with Callie and Gabriel. I could have sworn the term of endearment "beauty" was used in more than one book as well, but going back through I wasn't able to find it. Still, the fact that I considered it one tells you how disturbed I was by these similarities (probably because I struggle with much the same when writing but work to make sure it doesn't happen as obviously as has here). 
 All this stated, I know how bleeding hard it is to write this genre well - maintaining period dialogue that is somewhat believable across an entire novel, let alone three, is a massive task. This author does that well. Her stories and characters are also engaging. But in terms of becoming a new favorite author of mine, I don't think that will happen unless her upcoming book has none of the similarity problems these three had. And yes, I do intend to read it.