Customer Reviews

Duchess For A Day (MIRA)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In 1895 governess Claire Orwell rejects the sexual advances of her employer Lord Nardees so he has her accused of theft. She is sent to Newgate where the Green Tooth keeps her safe from the advances of other inmates and also arranges for Queen Council Lord Northway to represent her in Magistrates Court where he gets her freed. Northway obtains a job for Claire to open up the Saratoga Springs, home of the wealthy Duchess of Beaumont. Claire gets Northway to liberate the Green Tooth, who cleans up as Olivia Sutton.

In New York, everyone assumes that Claire is the Duchess who has not been seen in several years. At first she tried to correct the error, but soon begins to enjoy her "new" life especially when wealthy tycoon Hank "Silver King" Cassidy arrives in town. As Claire and Hank fall in love, she wonders how to tell him the truth without losing him; knowing full well that the Duchess is coming soon and could have her incarcerated for impersonating her.

This engaging Victorian-American romance is a fun tale based on the classic "Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive". The characters make the late nineteenth century in this Upstate New York resort town seem alive so that the audience can savor a taste of the past. Although a second subplot involving Nardees crossing the Atlantic seems unneeded though suspenseful, Americana readers will enjoy attending the season along side Claire and Hank.

Harriet Klausner

After picking this up thinking it was another book, I thought I'd give it a go. I found the heroine Claire very hard to like - very hard. I'm sure she didn't like finding herself in jail at the start of the book yet she then goes on to commit a much bigger crime. She never once shows 'real' remorse over what she has done, and there were just too many 'coincedences'. Not to mention the storyline of the evil Lord from the start of the book... What was up with that? I thought to myself this has to get better... but it didn't - surely this is Mz Ryan's first book... i'm actually not in a hurry to read any of her other titles incase they are written the same way this was. The storyline was horrible, there were just too many convenient things occuring, the characters were shallow and to top it all off, the book just stopped dead - there just had to be more pages. If your curious to see what a disaster this book was, go to the library... i'm seriously considering taking the book back to bookstore and asking for a refund because i must have been missing a whole lot of pages.

Having bought this book based on the review above, i wanted to like this book but it was in no way a page turner. I forced myself to read it and found most of it vapid and inconsequential. There really is no plot so much as conveyances of saratoga scenery from one sex scene to another. I found myself skipping entire chapters and not being lost in the "plot" because of it which says to me that much of the writing was just filler. Many of the characters actions and reactions to different situations just didn't ring true and then of a sudden the book just kind of ends. It sounds like i'm being uncommonly harsh but having just finished two historical page turners in a row my disappointment with this book grows. I only give it the second star because i actually finished it.