The Wicked Duke Takes a Wife : All About Romance

The Wicked Duke Takes a Wife

Grade : C+

You know, I like cotton candy as much as the next person. But, even if it were made in France and spun from cane sugar and cost $25 a pop, it’s still cotton candy. The Wicked Duke Takes a Wife is gourmet cotton candy – stylish, sweet, excellently spun, and completely and utterly trivial.

Harriet Gardner used to be an actress and thief, but two years earlier she was given a second chance by the Boscastle family (see the author’s previous eight books). Though she now teaches at a girls’ finishing school and has learnt to suppress the outward signs of her former life, when Griffin Boscastle, Duke of Glenmorgan, comes to deliver his niece to the school he manages to push all her hot buttons and undo two years of intense work.

It’s pretty much love at first sight, and it helps that Ms. Hunter does nothing to hide that this is the real thing hidden behind a healthy dose of friendship and lust. Griffin and Harriet are nice, intelligent people who surmount the social divide by leaps and bounds – I suppose being a Boscastle, Griffin can do whatever he chooses, including marrying a known former cutpurse. The book is a fairy tale with a tepid suspense plot, but the story is told with snappy prose and enjoyable characters.

But here’s the thing: That’s it. There is nothing remotely memorable – except the prose – about the book, and as proof of that I finished the novel two days before writing this review and by then I’d already forgotten the hero’s name. I’ll further observe that this book has 328 pages and thirty-eight chapters, each divided by a blank page, which effectively brings down the page count to 291. And the margins are huge and the spacing is generous. God knows, quantity is not quality, but this book badly needed character development and depth. The opportunities were there – Harriet and Griffin have issues in their pasts, but with the love of a good man/woman BAM – they’re over. I mean, there is a reason it’s called Show and Tell. You show first. Then you tell. To my regret, Ms. Hunter omitted the former in favor of the latter.

Much of my disappointment comes from the suspicion that the author can do better. I’ve heard so many good things about Jillian Hunter, but I’ve read only one of her earlier Boscastle books and it was underwhelming. But hey, everyone deserves a second chance, so I asked for this one, despite a super generic title and cover. What I discovered is the same as the previous Boscastle book: All style and very little substance.

A recent AAR blog lamented a prolonged reading slump, and solicited ideas for getting out of one. Many people suggested reading out of the comfort zone as a solution, and I think the same could be applied to writing. So here’s my wish for the season: I hope that Jillian Hunter is free to try something totally new so she can apply her pizzazz to quality character development. Until then, adieu.

Reviewed by Enya Young

Grade : C+

Book type : European Historical Romance | Historical Romance

Sensuality : Warm

Review Date : November 4, 2009

Published On : 2009

Enya Young

I'm a teacher who's been fortunate to live in a few places; currently I'm in England. And if you give me a choice between savoury and sweet, I'll go for savoury every time.

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