The Duchess Deal
Tessa Dare
2/5
I used to steer clear of books like this because I was snobby, but now I can't seem to read anything but them. Emma is a seamstress on the verge of being evicted. She's out of cash because a duchess-to-be ordered an insanely intricate wedding dress and then never paid the bill. She goes to the duke to demand payment and he proposes to her instead.
I don't know, I used to think that these books were always demeaning and anti-feminist, but even the angsty angry ones like Ash have a difficult time making their wives do anything. Their relationship was pretty decent in that aspect, but the randomness of so many of the characters really annoyed me. It felt almost costumed, the people were pretending to use the societal conventions of the period but were really doing whatever they want. Which is fine and all, it just felt like their was zero-effort to make it fit into the peerage and like that's one of the coolest part of this time period.
If everything didn't have to be repeated a thousand times, if Emma and Ash could just forget about their own traumas for five seconds, I would have rated it higher. I know that may not be fair for me to say when I read the description of the book before starting it, but there was really no other conflict in the entire book and that's just boring. It wasn't a bad book, it was just unoriginal and not consistent with its time.
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