Bringing Down The Duke

I was drawn to this book by its cute cover, its focus on the suffragist movement and a romance featuring Annabelle Archer, a woman who goes against the restrictive ideas of what a woman can achieve in Victorian England. Oooo, a sassy protagonist? Yes please!

Things started out well as we're introduced to Annabelle, her friends and the Duke but took a bad turn for the last three-quarters of the book. Buckle up, my lovelies, this review is gonna be a bumpy ride.

Reasons I didn't like this book:

ONE: The main characters. I hated the Duke of Montgomery who was a pompous, controlling, brutish arse of a man who was passed off to the reader as someone a gal should be lucky to be with. Annabelle, in comparison, was a tedious limp dishrag of a woman whose main traits were her passivity and beauty -- and her ability to learn sexual actions from pottery. Yup. Her Oxford education clearly has nothing on that! Annabelle seemed to fall into situations (including the suffragist movement) and just goes along with it out of duty rather than passion. Women's rights? Yaaa, fo'get about it.

 

TWO: The romance. I didn't buy it .. at .. all. It came out of nowhere and took about 1.2 seconds to get steamy. Their connection was purely physical and their cringey initial sex scene felt like it is used to ensure the reader knew that the Duke is a masculine, primal beast of a dude. We get it! He da manly man. To me, he came off as possessive and abusive in the way he spoke and treated Annabelle, including trying to talk her out of her education to be his mistress. 

THREE: The historical aspects of Victorian England (including the suffragist movement) fell to the wayside. We didn't get great descriptions of the time or place and instead were saddled with anachronisms. Add in the final scene on a personal yacht (which was anything but historically accurate) and this was not a hit with this reader. 

This is not the feminist, fun romance with a focus on the women's rights movement that I expected. It lacks wit, a believable romance, even an ounce of feminism and a strong, sassy, take no guff female lead (a la Veronica Speedwell from Deanna Raybourn's popular series). Unlike other readers, this was a hot mess for me and a book I should have DNF'd.

My Rating: 2 stars

Author: Evie Dunmore

Genre: Historical Romance

Type and Source: Trade Paperback from public library

Series: #1 in the League of Extraordinary Women

Publisher: Berkley

First Published: September 3, 2019

Opening Lines: "Absolutely not. What an utterly 

hairbrained idea, Annabelle."

Book Description from GoodReads: England, 1879. Annabelle Archer, the brilliant but destitute daughter of a country vicar, has earned herself a place among the first cohort of female students at the renowned University of Oxford. In return for her scholarship, she must support the rising women's suffrage movement. Her charge: recruit men of influence to champion their cause. Her target: Sebastian Devereux, the cold and calculating Duke of Montgomery who steers Britain's politics at the Queen's command. Her challenge: not to give in to the powerful attraction she can't deny for the man who opposes everything she stands for.

Sebastian is appalled to find a suffragist squad has infiltrated his ducal home, but the real threat is his impossible feelings for green-eyed beauty Annabelle. He is looking for a wife of equal standing to secure the legacy he has worked so hard to rebuild, not an outspoken commoner who could never be his duchess. But he wouldn't be the greatest strategist of the Kingdom if he couldn't claim this alluring bluestocking without the promise of a ring...or could he?

Locked in a battle with rising passion and a will matching her own, Annabelle will learn just what it takes to topple a duke....

A stunning debut for author Evie Dunmore and her Oxford Rebels, in which a fiercely independent vicar's daughter takes on a duke in a fiery love story that threatens to upend the British social order.