This guest review comes from Lisa! A longtime romance aficionado and frequent commenter to SBTB, Lisa is a queer Latine critic with a sharp tongue and lots of opinions. She frequently reviewed at All About Romance and Women Write About Comics, where she’s on staff, and you can catch her at _@‌thatbouviergirl on Twitter. There, she shares good reviews, bracing industry opinions and thoughtful commentary when she’s not on her grind looking for the next good freelance job.

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Much Ado Over a Duke is in a word: wacky. Wackier than Daffy Duck in a pie-eating contest with the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. Wackier than Weird Al and Chris Fleming competing in an interpretive dance contest. We’re talking bananas, off the wall, untethered to reality. Do not come to this one expecting serious research or a serious plot. If you release those expectations, then you’re going to have a hooty good time like I did. I couldn’t go any higher than a B on it, but if you’re in the mood for a good, lighthearted read, you’re bound to kick up your heels and laugh your way through this one. As a matter of fact: read it as a parody and you’ll have an excellent time.

Lady Cordelia “Lia” Nichols has what you would call extremely bad luck in the relative department. First her father, Charles, Duke of Rothesay, dies. Then his heir, Will, dies a month later in the back alley of a gambling hell. Cordelia is horrified to learn at Will’s funeral that her late uncle had an adopted son via a brief and scandalous Gretna Green marriage to a scullery maid. Said son has now inherited the Dukedom and thus holds sway over the family’s fortune.

Lia has three other sisters – the sassy, gossip-loving Portia; wild, talented and plainspoken Bea and scientifically-minded stutterer Hermione. The estate, Hollyhead House, is crumbling down around their ankles and Charles spent his daughter’s dowries so they have no bargaining chips. All four are made wards of the new Duke. Cordelia knows she needs to do something, but what?

Serious and studious commoner Justin Wright — said adopted son – does not want to be a duke. He does not want anything to do with high society whatsoever. He also hates Hollyhead House after spending a portion of his childhood there training to be a blacksmith’s apprentice. He just wants to design buildings and live a normal architect’s life in London, thank you very much. But, alas, Justin is now the Duke of Rothesay. He is immediately dubbed The Blacksmith Duke by the local gossip column.

Justin shows up to settle the estate, much to the disdain of the Nichols girls. He wants to sell the house, and wants nothing to do with his guardianship of these four women. Things seem especially dire when, at the reading of Charles’ will, it’s revealed he hid a fortune on the property, but only the worthy will be able to find it. Justin and Cordelia embark on an immediate rivalry as they try to find the treasure, ignoring their percolating chemistry the whole time. Complications from both inside and outside of their lives loom, threatening to tear them apart.

Not a single moment of this book is rational, and not a second of it allows you to breathe before enthusiastically diving into the next plot point. It was like being on a rollercoaster with no seatbelts sometimes – and I’ll be damned if I didn’t enjoy myself. This was slam-bang entertainment with an amusing romance that had me shaking my head and grinning in equal measures. It is not, in any classic way what one would consider a masterpiece of historical romantic fiction. I giggled my way happily through it.

The wild plot contrivances that pile up are amazing and hilarious. The references to other romance tropes fly thick and fast. Yes, they have their very own Lady Whistledown Lite, Lady Prudence DeLessops. Cordelia is horse-mad, and wears her dead father’s clothing to go riding astride the toughest stallion in the family’s stable and gets herself bruised in the process. Portia is hilarious, and clearly modeled on Violet from Downton Abbey (I am very much looking forward to her book, which is next). And the sisters do the most utterly ridiculous things together to ensure that the house stays within their grasp, from studying ciphers to taking a sledgehammer to a garden statue. Again: a sensible plot is verboten here, so do not come to this novel looking for anything resembling it.

The whole mystery behind the treasure hunt is both unpredictable and silly.

The romance between extremely serious, sensible Justin and grown-up Cordelia tickled me greatly. He thinks she’s stuffy and prim (in spite of the whole riding-around-like-a-man thing); she thinks he’s self-centered. She wants to save her home; he has nothing but bad memories of it and wants to sell it so he can return to London. They are unsuited for each other, according to Cordelia, but encounter after encounter proves them wrong. She’s just unbalanced enough to make his seriousness seem less irritating, and he’s just serious enough to add a tiny pinch of gravitas to the proceedings. They suit in spite of themselves.

There are so many great quotes here: Cordelia telling a minor character that “gentlemen do not ask ladies about their skeletal integrity” will stick with me for a long time. That’s just one reason why you should read Much Ado Over a Duke. After all, I need to learn what Portia does after that forbidden kiss with Justin’s disreputable friend, Henry Peverill.