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 Leopold Dautry, the duke of Villiers, has a serious problem. He’s just realized that his six bastard children are not in the reliable schools that he thought, but rather shoved off into the cheapest places possible so that his soliciter can keep all his money. While he sets about finding his children, he knows that he needs a noble wife to help him introduce them into society and keep them in his house. He needs the daughter of a duke, which leaves him two choices, Eleanor, the daughter of the duke of Montague, and Lisette, the daughter of the duke of Gilner. Eleanor is beautiful and makes him laugh, but Lisette, while considered mad, cares nothing for society’s dictates and adores children. Villiers must make a difficult choice between them in order to find the woman who will not only be the mother of his children but the companion of his dreams.
This is the sixth entry in Eloisa James’s Desperate Duchesses series, and while knowledge of what’s gone before would help, I think this one actually does a great job standing on its own. This is because it’s focused directly on the couple at hand and their relationship is all new. While Villers’ character has been brilliantly developed over the course of these six novels, this one builds enough on that to make it stand alone, particularly when he finally falls in love. And it’s all done in Eloisa James’s witty, clear prose, which immediately draws me in and won’t let me stop reading.
I hestitate to spoil exactly which woman Villiers falls in love with, although it is somewhat obvious from page one. If you’d like to read this without any indication of what’s going to happen, please stop reading now! The back cover is right in that he chooses between logic and passion. He believes for a while that Lisette would be a perfect choice for his children. She likes to play with them and she ignores society completely; but what he doesn’t see (and what is fairly obvious to the reader) is that she is like a child herself and as such would be completely incapable of caring for them. I’m not sure what’s meant to be wrong with her, but it certainly doesn’t make her an appropriate mother and wife.
Eleanor, on the other hand, is an amazing heroine. Having set her heart aside for her childhood love, who also happens to be a duke, Eleanor declared long ago that only a duke would do. If her love was forced to marry someone else, she would remain true to him. After a number of years, however, Eleanor is lonely, and wishes she hadn’t issued that silly statement. At this point, a duke appears on the horizon, searching for a wife, and almost immediately Villiers and Eleanor strike a deal. Watching them become friends after that and then fall in love is a beautiful thing. It’s made even more so by the fact that Eleanor believes – and at times I believed even though I knew this had to have a HEA – that he is going to choose Lisette. They can’t help loving each other because they genuinely like each other, and in my opinion the fact that they have both this and the chemistry going on is a wonderful achievement.
This book was for me the capstone on a series that has turned out to be wonderful. At first consumed with too many secondary characters, by the fourth book they begin to come into their own and steal the show. Over the series, I have grown to love Villiers most of all, and this is the perfect ending for him. I can’t recommend A Duke of Her Own enough. I kind of wish I could read it for the first time all over again.
 Kiernan Fitzgerald’s sister Kathleen has been kidnapped, and if he can’t find the Jewels of the Madonna in time, he fears for her life. On the run from the men who took his sister, Kiernan runs into Samantha Lewis at a cafe and asks her to pretend to be his date so he can escape. Perplexed, Sam goes along with it, hoping Kiernan might help her forget her horrible ex-fiance, especially given she is on what was meant to be their honeymoon. When she experiences strange dreams and flashbacks, Sam begins to wonder whether she and Kiernan are reincarnations, reliving a love story that happened more than five hundred years ago.
I liked The Treasures of Venice a lot more than I was expecting to! I normally don’t like romantic suspense novels; I read this one for the dual history prospect since I enjoyed The Reincarnationist by M.J. Rose. Normally, I find romantic suspense isn’t conducive to believable relationships, since at least half the book will be spent intriguing, running away from bad guys, or having the characters’ lives in danger. That’s also the case here, but I liked the couple and I loved the historical tie-in. I felt that the second, older timeline was a little gimmicky; I could actually believe in the present-day love story a little more, probably because the latter is given more screen time. Maybe also because I had trouble believing that any fifteenth-century woman would have a chance to escape her entourage in broad daylight every single day. It was completely necessary to have both storylines, though, or the ending would have felt very deus ex machina instead of having been built up the whole time. I did love the little trip into Venice’s history, the cathedrals, the detective hunt for specific graves, the gondola trip, and so on.
As I mentioned already, I liked the couple that were the main focus of the book. Even without the physical spark between them that we’re explicitly told about, I felt they had a connection from square one and then built on it nicely, so I found myself hoping for them to be together. The suspense towards the middle-end of the book ramped this up for me a lot and I found myself realizing just why people like romantic suspense. It was cute how worried the main characters got about each other, especially when the bad guys were all taken care of, because they didn’t know how to act without that filter of danger. They figure it out, though, of course.
I really enjoyed The Treasures of Venice and would definitely recommend it to those who enjoy contemporary romance or romantic suspense, with a hint of historical mystery.
I cannot believe it’s September! This is a terrifying month for me. My dissertation is due and I’m actually moving, not just talking about and dreading it. Most of the wedding planning is now under control at least, barring my immigration (of course), so I may actually be able to spend more time blogging again in a few weeks, at least until the time comes for my job hunt. I also had a bit of a computer hiatus due to wrist pain recently, but that mostly manifested itself through me avoiding twitter, which is far too addictive for its own good.
As might be expected, I read considerably less in August than throughout the rest of the summer, but still a good amount, 19 books. I read:
Historical Fiction
Romance
- A Duke of Her Own, Eloisa James
- The Treasures of Venice, Loucinda McGary
- What Happens in London, Julia Quinn
General/Literary Fiction
- Dragon House, John Shors
- The Wilderness, Samantha Harvey
- Burnt Shadows, Kamila Shamsie
History
- Blood and Roses, Helen Castor
Fantasy
- Club Dead, Charlaine Harris
- Bone Crossed, Patricia Briggs
Young Adult
- Prophecy of the Sisters, Michelle Zink
Looking at this list, the most worrying thing is how many of these books I haven’t reviewed yet. I have eight reviews to write and while I’ve had more, I’ve never let so long go without at least reviewing the earlier ones. I’m actually running out of reviews. I just hope I can catch up after my draft is in tomorrow even though I have tons of other bloggy stuff to do.
So, I’ll leave you with a lovely relaxing picture of the rainforest biome at The Eden Project in Cornwall and escape back to the million things occupying my time.
 How was your reading month?
 In besieged Sarajevo, a cellist, gazing out his window, sees more than 20 people die from a bomb while waiting for bread. In mourning for them, he decided to play at that exact spot for 22 days, to honor all of the dead, putting his life at risk. Meanwhile, Kenan ventures out most days, embracing danger to get water for his family and inexplicably the neighbor, an old woman whom he has never liked. Dragan feels a burden on his family, his wife and son sent away before the war, and finds some comfort in his job at the bakery. Arrow, a sniper, is determined to wreak revenge on the people in the hills who are killing so many of her townspeople. Together, these characters weave a picture of a city under siege, somehow seeking hope but not yet hopeless.
My favorite character, to whom I wished the narrative would keep returning, was Arrow. She is the most interesting of all of them, a killer, but somehow one that we can love and empathize with even as she chooses her targets and plans her strategy. She’s a murderer who has blocked off her heart somehow, drawing a direct line between the girl she was and the sniper that she is now. I can’t imagine not feeling for her. The other characters were less compelling, especially Dragan, who seemed obsessed with a variety of things and complained too much. The cellist didn’t have much of a personality. Kenan was also a compelling character and I enjoyed the discoveries he made and the thoughts he had over the course of the novel.
Perhaps the only problem I had with it is that I liked it while I was reading it, but now that it’s been a while since I finished, its core meanings have not stayed with me particularly well. War is wrong and savage, and it’s lovely that the cellist brought hope into its midst, but I have read other books about Sarajevo and I’m not sure this stands out as much as perhaps it should. I enjoyed its ruminations on survival while people are out to kill you, how the city holds together as one being, and Arrow’s protection of the cellist, but I’m not left with a desire to reread this one, perhaps because I just never developed a deep relationship with the characters.
I am glad I read it and I would recommend The Cellist of Sarajevo, particularly if you enjoy bleak stories about war with a light shining through the darkness.
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