I don’t always have to like or understand characters to enjoy a book, but I do want to respect them. While there certainly were admirable aspects of the hero and heroine of The Unclaimed Duchess, there were others that just turned me off.

Lady Anne Danvers and Rhys Carlisle, the heir to the Duke of Waverly, have been betrothed since they were small children – and Anne has been secretly in love with the rigid, cold, and superior Duke since she was a child. Rhys sees her as a gentlewoman worthy of being a duchess; he’s extremely proud of his bloodlines, and firmly believes in the aristocracy’s basic principle of superiority by virtue of birth. However, shortly after their nice, but impersonal, honeymoon, he learns something that shatters his identity: his father was not the Duke of Waverly. His mother had had an affair with another man, the father of Rhys’ best friend, and those bloodlines that Rhys holds in such high regard aren’t true.

To make matters worse, this news has fallen into the hands of a blackmailer, and this secret isn’t even something he can keep to himself. The news shatters him, and he flees his brand new marriage and plans to leave Anne to protect her from the scandal. Being in love with him, she clearly isn’t okay with this – so it’s up to her to restore their marriage, and heal Rhys’s wounds.

Rhys is, well, sort of an SOB. In the beginning he’s an arrogant ass, viewing just about everyone but other dukes as inferior to him. I suppose this is what some of the nobility must have felt, but he takes it to a whole new level. In this way, Anne is a good match for him. She is definitely a softening presence, and does a lot of good for him. That said, he still behaves stupidly and stubbornly for most of the book, and most of his actions are nonsensical at best. He did change and evolve, and was a much better person at the end than he was in the beginning, but this change didn’t truly happen until the very end. For Anne’s part, I guess you have to admire her perseverance in trying to connect to Rhys, but after the fourth of fifth time Rhys shoved her away and she brushed it off, it sometimes seemed a bit pathetic to me. Meanwhile, the one time she does actually get pissed, it wasn’t even for a good reason.

The writing style of the book didn’t impress me. It was a bit unpolished and unsophisticated for my tastes, though no more so than many books I’ve read lately. Overall, the story just didn’t really work for me. I wish it had, because the basic plot line is an intriguing one and had a lot of potential for creating a complex and dynamic hero. Unfortunately, Rhys fell short of that and his evolution as a character didn’t make me like him at the end any more than I did in the very beginning.