The Duchess Deal

The danger of falling in love with a new genre is that it adds so many books to your TBR list. It's easy to do a bit of research and zero in on the authors that seem up your alley. And then suddenly you have to read everything that author has ever written. Romance is particularly dangerous in that most authors are pretty prolific.

Which is a long way of saying that I loved my first Tessa Dare book. And now there's another 10+ books I need to read. It also makes me that much more eager to try the other authors I've seen talked about in the same articles: Julia Quinn, Courtney Milan, Lisa Kleypas. At least I'm already most of the way through Sarah MacLean's work.

The Duchess Deal is about an arranged marriage, sort of. The Duke of Ashbury was severely injured in the war (what war? It doesn't really matter). His fiance was horrified by his scars and refused to marry him. But the Duke needs an heir, so he proposes marriage to the first halfway respectable woman he meets, promising that as soon as she's pregnant she can retire to the country house and a life of (secluded) luxury.

It's too good a deal for the struggling seamstress Emma to turn down, but she also doesn't want to be just a broodmare. So she insists on dinner and conversation in addition to her wifely duties. And it's really no surprise when the two fall head over heels in love.

There are overtures of Beauty and the Beast, with the disfigured hero and a houseful of servants whose main goal is for him to fall in love and therefore lighten up a bit. The duke also has a bit of a vigilante streak. All of which adds up to absurd and delightful situations that keep pushing the married couple closer and closer together.

Emma also befriends a group of wallflowers, each of whom will presumably be getting her own book. And I'm excited to learn more about each and every one of them.

The good thing about romance novels is that they're very quick and easy to read. I'm planning to spend my upcoming maternity leave focused on them (assuming I have the brainpower to read anything more complicated than Green Eggs and Ham), which should help me make a dent in my backlog. Or more likely it will expand until it's truly out of control.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shadows of Self

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...
Read more

Specials

I have to admit that the conclusion to this trilogy felt a little flat to me. There were definitely some good things, and I still think the series as a whole is good and tackles interesting questions with some good nuance. I even liked the actual ending of the story. But so much of this book felt like a rehash of the second one that I felt a little bored by the end of it. Once again, Tally has had her brain rewired, and once again she sets out into the wilderness where he solitude helps her figure out what she actually wants. The love triangle sort of fizzles out and the stakes are revealed to be not nearly as high as it seemed. What felt like a worldwide conspiracy is mostly confined to one city, and Tally's role shifts. She does help save the world, but it's more about preventing a war than ushering a grand revolution. Which isn't to say that the revolution doesn't happen. But it's not the complete overthrow of society that the rebels wanted. And that's pr...
Read more

Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.
Read more