Sins of a Wicked Duke
Sophie Jordan
ISBN: 9780061579172
Read Sept 22, 2014
Short version: Erk. Non-consensual crap all over the place here.
Snarky Summary: An obvious prologue sets up at least a trio of novels about three dissimilar young girls who meet in a brutal boarding school as children. This story focuses on Fallon. She's Irish, she's an orphan (her father died on a trip overseas to collect garden plants for a noble), she's tall and strong and has wild red-gold hair. Due to her height, beauty, and her hair, she keeps getting molested by the sons and husbands of her employers when she's trying to work as a maid, and in rejecting their advances, gets sacked. After meeting a notorious noble rake, she hatches a plot to work as a manservant instead, chops off her hair, and goes for it.
Dominic (obviously the "Demon Duke" has to be named Dominic) and I'm confused about his ducal nature as his grandfather is a pastor in a small country town? Anyway - actual peerage aside, he's spent his life working hard to be unfeeling and careless and wicked because his grandfather (the aforementioned pastor) was too hard on him when he was a young child.
Fallon ends up as Dom's valet, much non-consensual intimacy happens - and this is really irritating, because the whole POINT of her working in disguise as a man was that she was trying to avoid this crap, and the hero spends the whole time pawing at her because he can't help himself, and besides, she likes it, so it's all ok and he's not doing anything wrong because he's just passionate. God in heaven. Give me a freaking break.
Anyway. Plot contrivances related to her father's untimely death lead Fallon to a lonely life in a cottage in the small town where the grandfather is the pastor. She becomes a sort of nursemaid to him (despite the fact that everyone in Society has to know that she was Dom's valet while dressed as a boy, because all the servants knew), the wayward Duke returns when the grandfather is on his deathbed (and don't even get me started on how the whole death and funeral bits were just ignored) and yay now they are married (erm, what?) and have a daughter!
I like the idea of heroines in male drag, I like "rags to riches" stories, and I would have liked this if there had been any attention given to the process of passing, to the actual historic situation of servantry and the Ton, and if the hero hadn't been totally rapey.
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