Bringing Down the Duke
Evie Dunmore
2/5
This is a pretty low rating versus how much I was initially enjoying the book. Annabelle is a suffragist, she earned a scholarship to be one of the first women at Oxford based on her merits as a scholar and her drive. To maintain this scholarship, she has to petition wealthy gentlemen and ladies to support abolishing the act that made women as property. She meets the Duke of Montgomery and is assigned to take him down, or to bring him to their side, but it quickly shifts to a more romantic relationship.
That's all fine and cliche and nice, but I feel as though there could have been much more focus on the suffragist elements of this narrative. It felt too much like a contemporary romance attempting to adopt elements of a cliche regency romance. As someone who has read a lot of regency romance and contemporary romance, it felt almost juvenile, like I was being spoon-fed the speech and behavioral patterns of regency. That would work for middle-grade, but this was very obviously an adult novel.
Annabelle was on and on about how she had worked so hard to get where she was, but we didn't see much of Annabelle working. I respected her resolve to not end up his mistress, but then I felt as though she was selling herself out anyways. The novel praised the Duke so much for doing such minimal things, and I know that it was the period, but it didn't really sit right for me at all.
It wasn't the worst book I've ever read, I just felt like it was trying too hard to be something that it wasn't. If it had firmly rooted itself somewhere, maybe I would have liked it more. I know it has a lot of hype and it looks super cutesy, and it was an easy read, it just doesn't have everything I'd want from a book like this.
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