Miss Minerva Lane is a quiet, bespectacled wallflower, and she wants to keep it that way. After all, the last time she was the center of attention, it ended badly–so badly that she changed her name to escape her scandalous past. Wallflowers may not be the prettiest of blooms, but at least they don’t get trampled. So when a handsome duke comes to town, the last thing she wants is his attention.
But that is precisely what she gets.
Because Robert Blaisdell, the Duke of Clermont, is not fooled. When Minnie figures out what he’s up to, he realizes there is more to her than her spectacles and her quiet ways. And he’s determined to lay her every secret bare before she can discover his. But this time, one shy miss may prove to be more than his match…
The Duchess War, by Courtney Milan
It was probably good that I waited to reread this until after I had already submitted my book to Amazon, because honestly reading this makes me want to take my book and put it through another 47 drafts so it achieves maybe half the level of excellence on display here. Maybe.
I would say if I was lucky, but that downplays the amount of hard work and research that went into The Duchess War. What makes the book excellent isn’t luck. It’s the phenomenal writing, the solid characters, the historical research, and the plausible plots that still allow for strong female characters. It’s Georgette Heyer meets modern Regency with a touch of the deeper political issues of the day thrown in for good measure and the result is an amazing book.
(Well, I’ll use the term Regency loosely here, because as the story indicates, it actually takes place in Victoria’s reign. However, the hero is most definitely a Duke. A flawed, human Duke, but a Duke nonetheless, and therefore in my personal classification system, the book gets filed under Regency. Apologies to all the librarians I just made twitch.)
Miss Minerva Lane has fled from her past. She wants nothing more than the safety of anonymity. However, the unfortunate coincidence of her name combined with her charity work for factory workers has convinced the head of the local militia that she has been writing inflammatory handbills calling for the unionization of workers. If he starts digging, none of her secrets will be safe — so the obvious solution is to find who is printing the handbills and therefore clear her name.
Unfortunately, this puts her directly on a collision course with the Duke of Clermont, the one gentleman she’d prefer to avoid at all costs. He makes her dream, something she absolutely can’t afford to do. Watching the two of them come together is an absolute treat and there were several points where I read sections out loud to my husband because they made me laugh (and honestly sounded like a conversation the two of us would have).
A lot of the romances I read are light — I’ll jokingly call them my literary Twinkies, because they’re for fun. (And before someone thinks I mean this as a bad thing, I derived very little enjoyment out of any book I read in high school English classes with the exception of Pride and Prejudice. I like my Twinkies, thank you very much, and I absolutely respect how much work goes into writing them.) The Duchess War, however, is a book that manages to feel like something more, even as it still hits all the notes required for an excellent romance.
So I hope that, with a lot of hard work and practice and maybe just a little bit of luck, I will someday write something at least half as good as The Duchess War. And in the meantime, if you haven’t read it already, you should go and fix that.