Review: Romancing the Duke by Tessa Dare

Romancing the Duke is the second installment in my experiment to see if I like the historical romance genre; unfortunately, this book was not quite one for me. The book follows Izzy Goodnight, who had recently acquired a castle through inheritance, which is lucky because, before that, she had nothing due to her father's unexpected death and his heir's lack of compassion. When she arrives at the castle, she finds the former owner still living there, partially blinded and unaware of the change of ownership. The two don't much get along but must figure out who truly owns the castle.

I am going to start with the things I liked about this book. I really liked the twist; obviously, I am not going to spoil it, but I certainly did enjoy it. The only other storyline I was compelled by was the who owns the castle story, but only in the second half of the book. In the first half of the book, I completely did not understand how I could possibly be rooting Izzy to be the owner. But I enjoyed the resolution and the way this caused further plot development in the second half.

Moving on to less positive thoughts. I didn't like either of the main characters. I can like books without liking the characters, but I disliked things that I was pretty sure were meant to be positive traits. This might not have been a big deal if I had really liked a lot of other aspects of the book, but I did not. I found Izzy to be vain, and I always find that frustrating, especially with how it was handled in this book (doesn't matter if you are ugly I'm blind/I already love you what's it to me if you are ugly, I wanted more self-acceptance that male acceptance). I found the hero, Ransome, to be quite patriarchal, and I am not a big fan of the character arc where someone learns to not be shitty to women through love, especially when the other women in the story are treated as silly by the author.

And oh boy, were the other women all treated as incredibly silly. None of the other women in this book really had much to redeem them. Izzy's friend did go from 'silly and pious' to 'silly and someone I love,' but I still didn't really think she had much dimension to speak of. The other women that appear in this story are an amorphous blob of fangirls who don't get any significant page time except to allow our main characters to make out and to serve as counterparts of the fanboys who have a plot point (a very weird plot point) to achieve.

I didn't like the pace of this novel. I just found it to be a clunky and odd read for myself. It was quite fast in a way that made the relationships developing all seem very odd to me. I also just found some of the content very cringeworthy. I literally exclaimed in disgust/my own feelings of discomfort multiple times though out this read.

This book was very much not for me, but I shall continue on with my experiment and see what I like in this genre. I gave this book two stars on Goodreads and the StoryGraph.