Book 35: Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore

This was a perfectly lovely historical romance that unfortunately suffers from not being written by Courtney Milan. Which sounds harsh! But it's a romance about a woman who sort of stumbles into becoming a suffragette in Victorian England, and she falls in love with a Duke, and it's a completely unacceptable match, and there's politics and banter and potential loss of virtue and discussions about what role in his life she can actually play, and all of this, and at the end all I could think was "this system is irreparably broken and I don't buy this resolution." It's an odd reaction, because I read a lot of gay historical romance novels, and I specifically love how those stories can show the way queer people did exist all throughout history, in high and low society. But I find it harder to believe in straight romance a lot of the time, because we want the good stuff without the bad stuff. We want the woman who was able to go to Oxford but is still beautiful and meets a duke but he's the good version of a duke, or a less bad one at least. But sometimes I almost prefer the historical romances that simply don't reckon with the historical realities of the fantasies. This book is quite close to hitting the sweet spot, but it doesn't actually nail it, and so I came away from it feeling disquieted, rather than charmed.

Grade: B