Not the Duke’s Darling

by Elizabeth Hoyt

December 18, 2018 · Forever

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NB: Not the Duke’s Darling by Elizabeth Hoyt is the start to a new historical romance and we know many of you are curious about this one! Well big thanks to Ellen McCammon for submitting this guest review, so we don’t have to keep you waiting any longer.

Ellen researches gender, sexuality, and sexual health in her day job and spends her free time reading, writing, and making textile crafts. You can follow her on Twitter @bookpriestess or on Instagram @thebookpriestess.

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Given my deep and abiding love for Elizabeth Hoyt and the Maiden Lane series, and the very intriguing premise of this book, my expectations for Not the Duke’s Darling were very high. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say I was disappointed, as I definitely enjoyed the book, but it was no Wicked Intentions ( A | BN | K | G | AB ).

So, the setup: our heroine, Freya de Moray, is the daughter of a duke living under a false name, working as a lady’s companion. She is also a member of a secret society of independent, super-competent ladies called the Wise Women, whose general mission (as far as I could glean) is helping other women maintain their own independence. Freya is a total badass: she’s courageous, strong, confident, and really into justice, but also very warm and compassionate. If I were grading this book on just the heroine, it would be an A.

The hero, Christopher (nicknamed Kester) was the best friend of Freya’s brother, Ran, growing up. Many years ago, Kester, Ran, and their other friend, Julian Greycourt, were all involved in a Mysterious Bad Thing that happened between the three families and ended with Ran maimed and some other tragic things that are revealed later in the book. Kester has been living in India since the Mysterious Bad Thing and only recently returned.

Kester is…fine. He’s definitely a good dude and didn’t trigger any “yuck” alarms from me–I’m always nervous when a hero has been spending time in India but I thought it was handled okay here. Basically Kester was unobjectionable but not super compelling. He came across as fairly generic, especially compared to a lot of the Maiden Lane heroes.

Because of various reasons involving blackmail, witch-hunting, and some dastardly villains involved in possible wife-murder, Freya and Kester end up at the same house party. Freya blames Kester for what happened to her brother and views him as her sworn enemy. Kester does not recognize Freya initially. But you know who else is at the house party? Freya’s childhood friend, Messalina Greycourt (sister of the aforementioned Julian), who DOES recognize Freya.

Are you getting the sense that there’s a lot going on here? Because there’s a LOT going on here.

In terms of the romance between Freya and Kester, my overall feelings were in the “meh-to-positive” range. I did really enjoy all the verbal (and literal!) sparring in the initial anger/lust-based encounters. In these early scenes before Kester realizes who Freya actually is, she’s full of rage, he’s confused and/or angry, and they are both pretty horny. I personally find this dynamic delightful and the dialogue and descriptions of emotion in these scenes are lovely:

For a moment he thought she might explode, like a dueling pistol poorly primed.
Then she said, low and deadly, “Tomorrow morning. Five of the clock. Name the place.”
He hauled her against his chest, so close he felt her breath brush his lips. “You want an assignation with me, madam?”

She ignored his double entendre. Her gaze was direct and fiery. “I want your blood.”

Horny, confused people fighting! Wonderful.

It’s clear pretty early on that the main thing keeping Freya and Kester apart is a Big Misunderstanding. I know a lot of readers do not have a whole lot of patience for relationship problems that can be solved with a simple conversation. The good news is that in this book, the Big Misunderstanding is resolved fairly early on.

However, there’s not a whole lot of conflict to sustain the romantic tension after this Big Misunderstanding is resolved. Sure, there’s some hemming and hawing about Freya having to give up her legal personhood and independence if she ever marries. To be clear: this is a valid and even monumental concern! Except I felt like the book never took this dilemma seriously enough for it to be a real point of tension. It was all kind of hand-waved away by the other characters (and eventually Freya) with, “Oh, a good guy won’t hurt you!” Ladies, the problem isn’t what a good guy will do, the problem is knowing in advance if he’s a good guy before you give him complete and total legal power over you.

Sarah Maclean said something great on one of the earlier Fated Mates episodes (amazing podcast, btw) that she finds romances most compelling when she thinks, at some point in the book, “I don’t know how the main couple is going to get past this.” I never got anything close to that sense in NTDD. This may be partly because after the first half-ish of the book, the main focus shifted from the romance as the central issue to all of the other plot machinations. (Of which there are a lot). By the time the focus shifted back more to the romance I had kind of stopped caring about it and I was more invested in…

Folks of romancelandia, there is SO much Plot Stuff happening here. Like I mentioned, there’s blackmail by a ne’er-do-well, there’s a group of evil witch hunters called Dunkelders who are the sworn enemies of the Wise Women, there’s a murder investigation, there are attempts to foil legislation. Every major character is operating on some kind of deadline and/or is on a Secret Mission. I actually love a bonkers-town plot in my historicals, and this is something Hoyt generally does really well–I mean, Maiden Lane had an ongoing masked vigilante subplot that lasted many books, and I was BEYOND on board with that.

But in this case, I thought there was so much stuffed into a relatively short book (my paperback copy has a 120-page novella at the end to make it seem beefy but I AM NOT FOOLED) that it came at the expense of the romance and the quality of the book overall. It felt like there was a lot of world-building and set-up for future books. This is fine, but it felt much less organic than it did in Wicked Intentions, which was also a series opener. (I realize I keep circling back to Wicked Intentions, but it’s one of my top romances of all time, #LordCaire4EVA).

And even with all of the world-building crammed in, I’m still not completely sure what the Wise Women really…do? They have an organizational structure that we are sort of told about but it’s not clear exactly what their long-term purpose is other than…misandry? Which, I would love to go live at their estate in Scotland and start embroidering samplers that say “MEN ARE TRASH,” but I’m also not sure what exactly I’m supposed to care about in terms of their mission or the big-picture stakes or anything like that. Nonetheless, I remain intrigued by the premise and what we have seen of the Wise Women. I am really hoping that the Crow gets her own book!

This is a great segue into my next point, which is that the absolute best part of this book was the friendships between the women. Freya has close, affectionate relationships with her employers, the Holland family. There are some subplots about the marriage prospects of the Holland girls that I thought were an interesting window into all kinds of female relationships. Freya also rekindles her friendship with Messalina, and Messalina is friends with the party’s host, Jane. Eventually Freya, Messalina, and Jane team up to…

All of the female-female relationships in this book are positive, which is very refreshing in the historical romance genre, where the Evil Love Rival is kind of a stock figure. I would ABSOLUTELY read a completely romance-free historical mystery series with all of these women. (Although if I’m being honest, in my deepest heart of hearts, I kind of wanted Freya and Messalina to fall in love.)

While I wasn’t necessarily completely sold on the romance, and some of the world-building was a bit choppy, I have high hopes for the rest of the series. I loved all of the female supporting characters so much that I would read a book about any of them even if the hero was a literal bag of potatoes. Next up is Messalina, and it seems like her hero is going to be a character who has been presented to us as evil so far. No one can make me root for a morally ambiguous hero like Hoyt so I’m hoping the romance in book two will feel a little spicier. We’ve also established the premise of the Wise Women vs. Dunkelders so I’m also hoping future books won’t feel as weighted down by set-up.

Overall, I think if you are sufficiently intrigued by the premise of a secret order of Wise Women, you’ll enjoy the book. And if you don’t typically crave a lot of angst and emotional torment in your romance you might enjoy it more than I did!