Book Review

To Love a Duchess by Karen Ranney

I picked up this title because it was recommended to me as a historical with a mystery and a slow-burn romance. I like all those words. I like them quite a bit. What I ended up with was a narrative that, the more I thought about it, didn’t make sense because the first half of the story didn’t match the second.

Former soldier Adam Drummond is working for the British government undercover as a majordomo in a ducal household, looking for evidence that the late Duke of Marsley was responsible for betraying a regiment in Manipora, India, which resulted in the deaths of over a hundred women and children during the Indian Rebellion. This mission includes significant personal and professional stakes for him.

Widowed duchess Suzanne Whitcomb is mourning and is being controlled through manipulation, especially of her guilt and grief. Drummond first encounters her trying to throw herself off the roof of the house during a storm. So already there are significant emotional elements to this story: grieving, depression, trauma, addiction, and suicidal intentions.

At first, Drummond is suspicious of Suzanne, but focuses on his mission, which involves reading every diary the late duke wrote. Marsley started keeping a daily journal as a young man, and the library is full of his writing. Drummond wants to find the diaries from the years that included his time at Manipora to prove that Marsley was the traitor. It’s slow going. There are a lot of journals.

Suzanne, meanwhile, is controlled by her father, who sees her as a pawn in his own quest for advancement and behind-the-scenes political power. Having a daughter who is a duchess means that her wealthy father can use her status and his own wealth to acquire more power and influence through dinner parties and social gatherings at his home. He informs Suzanne of when she is to appear at his house for what event, and often informs her what to wear as well. He finds the customs of mourning to be terrible and tried to convince her to stop wearing black early. For her own sake and his, she refused.

Drummond and Suzanne are instantly attracted to one another, but aside from a handful of conversations where they are surprisingly honest with one another (up to a point – he is undercover) there isn’t much that informs their courtship other than mutual interest. There wasn’t much slow burn as there was mutual notice, then mutual attraction, then kissing – which was surprising for me because of the social barriers between them. He works for her (sort of), they are of two very different classes, she’s in mourning, etc. The romance jumped ahead from a low smolder to a lot of kissing to sexxytimes much faster than I expected, and without any real conversation about the many impediments to their being together. They go from circling each other warily, to talking honestly for a handful of lines then retreating back behind their roles, to kissing and then hey, there’s banging – which was not a slow burn. They vaulted over the real and substantial obstacles in between them with very little effort, despite thinking about them a LOT in prior chapters.

The mystery is also solved in a very surprising and unsatisfactory manner. The tone of the first half doesn’t fit the events of the second half, and the more I think about the story, the less it makes sense. The theme of every plotline in this book could be summed up as, A major, complex conflict or issue is introduced! Eh, whatever. It’s resolved easily.

I can’t really explain in detail without spoiling A LOT so the rest of this review will be behind spoiler tags. Be warned.

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It's spoiler time.

So here are the additional spoilery details:

  1. Suzanne is being drugged morning and night by her maid, who holds considerable power over her. She drinks a “tonic” that makes her forget to care about everything. It isn’t until she starts kissing Adam Drummond that she thinks maybe that tonic isn’t such a great idea. Later Adam and Suzanne discover that she’s been given opium. Twice a day. For months, possibly.
  2. The maid, Ella, manipulates Suzanne into compliance by threatening to tell Suzanne’s father that she’s disobeying, and Suzanne believes her father hired Ella after firing her maid. Suzanne doesn’t question this.
  3. Suzanne is mourning the death of her three-year-old son, Georgie, who died in a carriage accident with his father. Later the circumstances surrounding his death become suspicious and possibly related to Adam’s case.
  4. Adam isn’t sure he should trust his supervisor who sent him on this assignment, but he assumes that the man knows what he’s doing, and doesn’t question too much. Adam lost his wife in the killings at Manipora, so he’s grieving as well, but not as immediately as Suzanne.

So, we have drugging, grief, and possible traitorous behavior. Adam doesn’t tell Suzanne what he’s really up to until much later, but that wasn’t the part that bothered me. What didn’t work for me was the fact that so many characters are set up as terrible, and then the reader learns at the end that, wait a minute, they’re not bad. This other guy? Oh, he’s THE WORST and he’s really bad. Surprise! There’s a lot of build up of negative actions and behavior – Suzanne’s father is a good example – that is excused by the narrative when its revealed that he’s not the one behind all the betrayal or the manipulation of Suzanne. The characterization was uneven and inconsistent, with the reveals of the latter part of the book neither fitting nor explaining the behavior in the earlier parts. So many details of so many suspicious characters are overturned such that, by the end of the book, I was pretty sure everyone’s judgment was simply terrible, and didn’t trust any of their decisions or observations.

Then there were weird plot holes. Suzanne is grieving her son’s death, and a woman she meets at a party at her father’s home, Mrs. Armbruster, brings her to a new foundling hospital where orphaned babies and women of the working class who are pregnant or new mothers find safe homes, work training, and child care. Mrs. Armbruster wants Suzanne to become a patron of the hospital, but Suzanne is deeply traumatized by being around crying children, and leaves her visit in a terribly numb state.

Later, as Suzanne refuses the opium tonic, fires her maid (who openly threatens her, wtf) and begins to emerge from her grief, she keeps thinking about the orphaned babies. She’s been made aware of the way that women who become pregnant (often because of pressure or rape from their employers, or promises from men who, of course, do not face the same consequences as the women) are left with zero support and treated with contempt. She wants to help.

But Suzanne also knows in detail that her late husband was a philanderer who fathered 8 or 9 children with different women. Aside from learning that they exist, she has no thought for them, the women who had them, or if there is any support for them, either. She disregards them entirely. It’s bizarre and doesn’t fit with Suzanne’s awareness of women who have had babies whose lives have been destroyed. She cares for some but not others? It’s a strange and bothersome inconsistency that isn’t addressed in the story. She wants to help women who have had babies without family support to the point that she hires them for her household, but when she learns that another child of her late husband’s was born, she says she wants nothing to do with them, and that they shouldn’t be mentioned in her presence. What the hell.

Then there’s the part where Suzanne is being drugged and, while drugged, is possibly suicidal. It wasn’t clear to me exactly how long she’d been drugged by her maid, but it was definitely for several months, possibly nearly a year. I also didn’t quite understand how said maid gained the power over Suzanne to insist and then bully and coerce her into drugging herself, threatening her and manipulating her in every scene. Ella was cartoon-level awful. But Suzanne suffers very few withdrawal or physical symptoms, even after the contents of the tonic are revealed, and she doesn’t have much emotional or psychological struggles either, despite being emotionally abused, drugged, and gaslit by her maid, and attempting suicide.

Finally, for a book that rests its plot on investigating an incident during the Indian Rebellion, with former soldiers who lived in India for years, the cast of characters were staggeringly White until the very end when the late duke’s former secretary, who is Indian, is revealed. Of course, he has the journals to protect the duke’s secrets, and, of course, he knows all the answers. He’s protective of the late duke’s legacy. He’s wise and secretive. He’s very thinly developed. He’s a plot device.

Then there’s a throwaway line about Drummond when he and Suzanne finally go to bonetown:

He’d learned some things in India, and he was all for using his education.

Oh, for crying out loud. WHY is India the place where English dudes go to learn how to sex properly? It’s really freaking gross, so could we please stop? It’s one line, and it didn’t do anything but make the narrative racist and terrible.

All that combined just soured the book for me.

When I finished the book, I was eye-rollingly dissatisfied. I had wanted to find out who was the traitor, and if Suzanne was going to get any significant help for the trauma she’d been through. The reveal of the Bad Guy was extremely underwhelming, and happened very quickly. The resolution to the obstacles between Adam and Suzanne was also too fast and underwhelming.

Once I started thinking about all the little things that bothered me, it was like watching a piece of fabric fray as it hangs on the wall. The holes got bigger and the inconsistencies were more visible, and instead of the satisfaction of a mystery solved and a happy ending created, I was left with a lot more questions, frustrations, and disgust than when I started.

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To Love a Duchess by Karen Ranney

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  1. Ren Benton says:

    Never trust a label of “slow burn.” Half the people who use it think slow means “not banging by chapter two,” and the other half think burn means “no sign of affection until a chilly, grudging peck on the cheek on the last page.” Get details.

    The spoilered issue with the castoff women and babies is the real-world phenomenon I call the Cone of Charity. When the point of one’s charity is to feel good about oneself, one doesn’t want the glow of benevolence sullied by urchins who are close enough to cause uncomfortable personal emotions. In 2018, Suz would write a check to feed starving children in third-world countries while on the phone with the police trying to get a child arrested for the crime of being poor within her line of sight.

  2. DonnaMarie says:

    Also, the instarecovery after months of taking the most narcotic substance of it’s time. It’s a little tone deaf in the face of our overwhelming opiate problems today. It rings of the whole, if you’d just gut up and stop, everything will be fine mentality that a lot of people have about addictions, whether it’s drugs, cigarettes or alcohol. Meanwhile, IRL what happens to your body and brain when deprived of something it craves? It’s ugly, gut wrenching, and in some cases, potentially fatal

    @SBSarah, I’m happy to say that this time you reviewed a book that, thankfully, wasn’t even on my radar.

  3. Nang says:

    I’m so done with orientalist fetishism. I mean do these authors even think about what the experience of Indian women must have been under colonial rule??? Wanna take a wild guess about the likely “education” British soldiers got?

  4. Michelle says:

    I think it makes sense that someone would want to avoid dealing with some children. Too often heroines fall in love with those children to display their Moral Superiority and the mixed feelings or outright dislike is glossed over or non-existent.

  5. Jazzlet says:

    I can understand Suzanne not wanting to meet her husbands offspring or their mothers nor wanting to hear about them, but she could still have instructed her business man to ensure they had enough money to get by.

  6. BellaInAus says:

    While I can understand the frustration that comes from the sexual stereotyping of any group, I think we’re at the point where it’s easy to see stereotyping where none exists. If the quote about Drummond’s ‘education’ is the whole thing, I don’t see anything wrong with it. He’s not specifying who educated him, he’s referring to a time in his life. (Man, this is hard without spoilering!) Of course, if it’s part of a paragraph rhapsodising about specifics then there’s more of a problem.

    I would have a problem with the instarecovery. I gave up SUGAR and it took me a week to get over it.

  7. Lisa F says:

    This got a D from me too for all of the above reasons. I actually found the colonialism portrayed in the novel to be worse, since the author felt the need to

    MAJOR

    SPOILER

    HERE

    …invent a massacre, loosely based on a real life one, in which Adam’s wife was murdered violently in an uprising. If there had been more characters of Indian descent in the novel it wouldn’t be as bad, but aside from Plot Device Friend the entire uprising exists in the novel to cause Tragic Manpain for Adam.

  8. Lisa F says:

    I should strongly add: not to say that the above plot device would’ve been made magically better if there were more characters of Indian descent in the novel; it would have still been a racist and terrible plot point. But if there had been more Indian characters then the plot would have at least been rounded out (and maybe the Orientalism would have been called out) by their existence, voices and stories.

  9. Nuha says:

    @BellaInAus: The problem is though that almost every time a British historical romance dude mentions India, it’s almost always, always in the context of learning how to have sex. That’s it. That’s the “education”. But the thing is…India and the occupation thereof don’t exist just to illustrate how good the hero is at sex. Indians surprisingly don’t learn the Kama Sutra in the cradle; neither do we drape ourselves in translucent clothes and wait for Englishpeople to seduce, despite what every historical romance novelist seems to think. The entire trope is racist and relies deeply on the racism that bolstered European conquest of the world to begin with—that of the animalistic savage, the one with uncontrollable sexual urges that needed European rule to be curbed. So, you know, a fraught issue. The simultaneous hypersexualization and desexualization of the colonized body have been written about by better minds than mine, so it’s not like this is an unknown phenomenon. I just wish that it would crop up less in romance, and that perhaps when it is pointed out, it’s not dismissed.

  10. BellaInAus says:

    @Nuha.
    Ah, just like the only reason anyone goes to Australia in a historical is because they are a convict.
    I agree, it’s something that needs calling out. I just wasn’t seeing it in the quote given. Of course, I haven’t read the whole book.

  11. Lisa F says:

    And by ‘the entire uprising’ in the above comment I meant ‘the entirety of Adam’s military service in India’. Don’t write comments in the middle of the night, kids, this could happen to you too.

  12. Maria says:

    Miss Ranney just published an essay on her website about how she’s not a “pc writer” and is “accurately trying to represent the attitudes of the era” with her characters (maybe so, but suggesting that Indians living in India weren’t angry about the British occupation of the area is ridiculous).
    She also said readers suggesting that the colonialism in this novel is offensive are similar to students pulling down statues celebrating Confederate generals and are “erase the way history really was.” That’s one more author I’ll never read again.

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