Dukes Prefer Blondes is a book with irresistible characters, a great plot, and tons of witty banter. Y’all know how dearly I love a battle of wits, and this couple just never slows down on the battlefront. It would be A+ material if not for the extremely odd construction. It feels like this book is one draft short of finished, and also like it’s two books crammed into one.
Here’s the plot, and I’m going to spoil the crap out of it, so be warned.
No, seriously, there’s really not a way for me to talk about this book without a detailed discussion of the plot and where I think it worked and didn’t work, without the aforementioned detailed discussion.
So be ye warned.
Stop reading now. Spoilers commence now.
Seriously. Not joking here.
Here we go!
Clara is a perfect lady who is trying to avoid marriage because everyone who proposes to her is boring. She’s rich and gorgeous, so avoiding marriage is a pretty full-time job. Oliver Radford is in line to inherit a dukedom, but he’s way at the end of the line so he supports himself as a barrister. Clara literally bumps into Oliver when she’s almost hit by a carriage that is actually aiming for Oliver. Clara, who is involved with a charitable school for street children and fallen women, asks Oliver to help her locate one of the children, who has gone missing.
Warning: during the whole carriage murder attempt, the carriage driver kills a dog. It’s not a dog that we are attached to, and it is not known to suffer, but Clara and Oliver both discuss both the fact that no one will care about the dog and the fact that the dog was clearly miserable, one of many miserable stray dogs in London. This establishes the wantonly destructive nature of the villain, and the fact that this story will address what life was like for people who aren’t members of the aristocracy. There’s a lot of suffering in the story and it’s all foreshadowed by the poor doggie.
Clara ends up helping Oliver locate the kid and in the process earns his respect. She also contracts typhus so Oliver has to save her from the doctor who wants to bleed her and apply leeches. Oliver saves her life and they fall madly in love but Oliver refuses to court her because he’s just a barrister, blah, blah, she manipulates him with devilish glee, and it’s wonderful. Then her parents break them up so Oliver brings a breach of promise suit against Clara and they have a court case about it in his offices, which is highly amusing. He wins, they get engaged and GUESS WHAT!
The last of the relatives between Oliver and the dukedom dies, so now Oliver is a duke after all, and it’s a damn good thing he married Clara because neither he nor his parents have any idea what to do about this. Clara has trained her whole life for a moment just like this one so she runs around restoring the estate from neglect and hiring ex-fallen women and street criminals to work for her and she’s just generally wonderful.
MEANWHILE, a criminal guy has been trying to kill Oliver for the longest time – that’s how they met, remember? So he decides to kill Clara instead, and Oliver and Clara have to foil his evil plan. Which they do. Then they live happily ever after.
This isn’t a long book (the paperback edition is 372 pages) but it’s an awful lot of plot:
Part 1: They meet and solve the mystery of the kid.
Part 2: Typhus, trial, and marriage.
Part 3: They inherit a dukedom and catch a killer, with subtext that is not at all classist. That’s sarcasm – it’s totally classist, although it’s also nice to have a nod to that fact that not everyone in Days of Yore was hanging out in ballrooms drinking punch.
The whole plotline in which Clara gets the duchy fixed up and they catch the killer seems like an extra book – one I enjoy, but also one that feels tacked on. Because all these plots are shoved into a single book, there are some very weird time jumps. I often thought that I had missed a page or a chapter or something (but I hadn’t, I checked). The whole thing is very rushed.
My favorite Loretta Chase books involve relationships that I would never, ever want to be in (they seem exhausting) but that I never tire of reading about. While Dukes Prefer Blondes doesn’t have a battle of wills as strong as the infamous battle between Jessica and Dain in Lord of Scoundrels (no one gets shot, for starters) Clara and Oliver are in constant conflict. This would be awful if not for the fact that they are both so damn smart and so damn funny. Think 1940’s comedy – Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant or Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. By the end of the book Clara and Oliver seem to have settled into a slightly less madcap Myrna Loy/William Powell Thin Man kind of dynamic, but that still leaves plenty of room for banter.
Even though the book’s plotting is all the hell over the place, I still adored it because of the exchanges between Clara and Oliver. They would be horrible jerks were it not for the fact that their verbal volleys (particularly those that occur after Clara helps find the kid) are couched in mutual respect and affection. Both of these people have been longing for a sparring partner who can keep up with them, and now they have one:
“I thought it was my life that stifled me,” she said. “But I see it makes no difference what world I live in. The difference is the man at my side.”
He cleared his throat. “It seems you needed a particularly difficult one,” he said.
“Much more entertaining,” she said.
As it happens, it’s also entertaining for the reader. I’d love to see an on-going mystery series with these people. I just wish this particular book wasn’t at least two, possibly three, books crammed into one.
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Too much plot?
Ain’t no such animal.
An ongoing mystery series about the two of them is something I didn’t know I needed. But I do. I really, really do.
Loretta Chase does cram a lot of plot in her books but it doesn’t bother me. The Last Hellion has 3 points that feel like endings but aren’t. Really so much happens in that book and I love it. This book (Dukes/Blondes) didn’t feel nearly as crammed as that one. I like seeing what happens after the marriage, and really the whole murder plot seemed like a set up for the “this is what I’ve been doing about squirrelface” scene and that scene was brilliant.
I’ve not been as excited about the Dressmakers series as some of her older books (usual caveat that lesser Loretta Chase books are still better than most of whats out there), but this book had me in transports, both from the book itself (really, the banter is stellar) and from the inner squee that she does still have IT, in spades!
I get that it’s supposed to be witty banter, but I honestly could not like this hero because he seemed to always be saying something about “females” and then something condescending. To me, he came across as one of those misogynists who doesn’t like women, but likes *this* woman. Reminded me of The Cool Girl description in Gone Girl, honestly.
I wish he hadn’t become a duke. I wish it so much that I have decided that’s what really happened.
SPOILERY CORRECTION:
(YOU’VE BEEN WARNED, OKAY? YOU CAN STILL LOOK AWAY!)
He becomes the heir apparent, not the duke. His father is still alive, and thus, the new duke.
END SPOILER
agree with @elise; during the scene at the beginning where the hero is getting beat up as a child, i was thinking ‘what an annoying prick, he totally deserved it’, and he never actually seemed to get any better. i would have kicked him.
Okay kind of judging you @aquamarinaveen for the comment that anyone deserves to get beaten up as a kid. I know it’s fiction and you’re being hyperbolic, but I’m gonna be sanctimonious and say that promoting it normalized those kinds of. attitudes. Plus, I think the relationship in the novel itself is about her pushing back against him (in a nonviolent way!) when he says something stupid or domineering.
I’ve been a pretty vocal fan of this book and also this series as a whole. I feel like chase has been around for such a long time that you’ll have emotional attachments to books you read at an older time (such as how I still have really strong feelings about Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series even though I’ve arguably read better fantasy novels since). So I kind of hate the whole “old Chase was better” metric just because I read most of her books in the last two or three years and I actually think she’s gotten better in some ways. (Or maybe specifically just more modern. I mean, there’s a plot moppet and a Wound That Will Not Heal in Lord of Scoundrels.)
I think I’m feeling protective of this book mostly because I’m reading the Elosia James novel that was reviewed earlier and it’s currently really falling short compared to this one.
@jw:Amen!
I loved Lady Clara, she is a marvelous heroine and role model. I laughed and laughed at her responses to Oliver’s condescending obnoxious attitude. And I loved how hard he fell for her…..it was a triumph to see such a man realize he’s a lowly mortal like the rest of the world.
This book was delicious, I enjoyed every crumb and the audio-book, narrated by Kate Reading is brilliant.
My take on the sexist jabs is that he’s winding her up, not that he’s sexist. Invitations to the verbal dance/fights they both enjoy so much.
@jw: I hear what you’re saying but, in my case anyway, I’ve been reading (for instance) Mary Balogh just as long and I think the Survivors Club is some of her best work ever. So I don’t think my opinions are all nostalgia-based. That said, I’m right here with you on feeling protective of this book because it is awesome!
I loved this book, and jw, you are so spot on re: the new Eloisa J book. That one entertained, sort of, but was oh so trite. This is far superior (although nothing compared to my beloved “Mr. Impossible”). However, the masterpiece of these past few weeks goes IMHO to “The Rogue Not Taken”.
Do you think LC channeled John Steinbeck with the dog metaphor? Remember in “The Grapes of Wrath” when the Joads first hit the road, and the dog is hit as if it is meaningless?
Very much enjoyed this review. I also like a lot of plot. Would really love to read it but it’s not in the library and the Kindle price is above my price range but I daresay I will see it listed here for sale one of these days.
About the beating the hero received as a child… sadly, kids were beaten back in the day and no one thought anything about it because it was called disciplining a naughty child. Sadly, people are still hitting their kids. Even one of the candidates for the Presidency publicly admitted that he spanks his five-year-old daughter.
IIRC, child abuse, indeed all forms of abuse, didn’t get much national attention in the USA until the 1970s I believe, really took off in the 1980s and now we are more aware and better informed. Which is excellent.
@gloriamarie: ah I was mostly referring to the commenter before me who said “what an annoying prick, he totally deserved it”
From what I remember, the beating was actually a fight between kids where a bunch of older boys set on the hero, not his parents beating him. I agree with you about the old attitudes though, for some adults from an older generation, unless you educate them, they consider it an acceptable punishment/response to aggravation because their parents did it. Although in the context of abuse/beating, lots of abusive people convince themselves and the people they abuse that they “deserve this” and lots of abusive behavior is masked by corporeal punishment being considered acceptable—but that’s neither here nor there.
(But in the context of the scene of the book, she was basically saying, “he’s annoying so he deserved to get bullied” which…….. as someone who was annoying as a kid and bullied for it….. ugh.)
I LOVED this book. I didn’t think it was too much plot at all. The witty banter was exactly what I want in a book. I thought the occasional sexist comments along the lines of what you would see at that time period (when you read Sherlock Holmes, for example), but I didn’t feel like any of those comments were over-the-top. All in all, one of my top books of the year (with Tessa Dare’s latest book being one of the few others).
Just read this and loved it. It’s going to be one of my favorite Loretta Chase reads. The banter! And the way he falls for her, sigh! I didn’t have issues with the plot, and I don’t think it’s classist to have a criminal gang from the underclasses. (I think romance is well-supplied with Hellfire-club-style lords who get up to bad deeds, viscounts who spy against England, etc.) I love the idea of the mystery series – this couple kept reminding me of Nick and Nora Charles. Bring them back to solve some more mysteries, yes!