Review: Really not great
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 04 11, 2013
I had a bad day with books yesterday, and this was the first of the two that I bought. I was intrigued because it's about a duke and I love stories about dukes. The summary sounded good and I took a chance and it didn't pay off.It's another one of those "modern" historicals with modern attitudes, disguising itself as a Regency. There is also the fairytale element, which sometimes works but most often doesn't and here it doesn't work at all.A quick summary: Our H was engaged to the daughter of an earl, the h, for years. The daughter had gone missing many years previously and was presumed dead. Our H was just about to become engaged to someone else when he hears that the h has been found. She'd been adopted as a young girl by a vicar and his wife. She'd been kidnapped and given to the vicar, who was unaware of her true identity. The H decides to employ the h as a governess to his niece for the Summer, to see if the h has the character needed to be his duchess. He tells no one that he's found the h, particularly not her family as the 2 families have been feuding for a long time. You can see why the story sounded engaging and why I was tempted to buy it.***Spoilers****The problems that I had were the following:The H was a huge ass and there was no way I could like him even when the author tried to redeem him at the end. It wasn't even that he was a cruel alpha, he was just an ass all the way through. The idea being he was trying to live up to his grandfather's image of a duke and that wasn't a very nice one. I hated the fact that the H had a plan to persuade the h to marry him before revealing her true identity to her, so that he could avoid a problem with her real family. It created problems for them both the whole way through as she felt unworthy of his attention, being a lowly vicar's daughter.I hated the fact that the innocent h decided to seduce the duke about 60% into the book and this was the books one main love scene. I didn't feel the circumstances were plausible and she was after all a vicar's daughter.I then really hated the fact that the H leaves the h and goes off to get engaged to the other woman mentioned at the beginning. If he truly had deep feelings for her, then nothing would have persuaded him to do that. How are we supposed to believe in his love for her after that.I could go on and on but there isn't any point so I'll just say that the book was a disappointment and not worth buying. I gave it 2 stars solely because it wasn't riddled with errors like the other book I bought yesterday.