Customer Reviews

The Irish Duke (Signet Eclipse)

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

 

 

As the Dowager matriarch of her family, in 1894, octogenarian widow Lady Louisa Jane Russell holds court as she always has while looking back over the decades of her life. In 1819 Lady Louisa loves her position in society, which allows her to enjoy life to the fullest. Irish nobleman James Hamilton went so far as to propose, but she ridiculed him for being Irish with a speech impediment; of course he was nine years old at the time and she was his age.

In spite of her putting him down, they become friends though he never has given up marrying his Lu. Other men want her too, but though she adores them, she prefers her independent gaiety more so. However, over a decade later, a family scandal leaves Lu with the choices of marrying her kindhearted Irish admirer, someone else, or face scornful disgraced exile.

Few if any writer can interweave historical information to enhance a story line as deftly as Virginia Henley can and does with the enjoyable The Irish Duke. The story line is driven by the heroine who tells her great-granddaughters about her life with her late beloved Irish Duke who to his death insisted B is pronounced as a V. Fans will relish Ms. Henley's fine nineteenth century historical romance as the exhilarating plot with its strong lead protagonists brings the era to life.

Harriet Klausner

I ussually enjoy Henley's mix of rich history and romance. But in this story, the only history is the fact that the character's actually existed. There're no real political intrigues or big historical event. And, unfortunately, there is ZERO romance. I can't see why the characters loved each other, they never showed it and it was never explained--beyond the fact that the hero has a crush on and proposed to the heroine when he's 9 and she's 7. Who hangs on to a crush that long? There's no explanation of why they supposedly are in love. The only interesting part of this book was the side story involving the heroine's sister...there's literally nothing else of interest going on!

This book has zero sexual chemistry between the hero and the heroine. Moreover, his devotion and love didn't make any sense at all. He falls in love after watching the *7* year old heroine dance when he was only 9 years old, he then doesn't see a hint of her until he's 19 but he's apparently still mad about her. The book is just filled with boring secondary characters who're actually more interesting than the heroine. Who happens to be a spoiled, whiny, and stupidly naive, little prude.

I've been trying to finish this book for the past 2 weeks, but I decided tonight to give it away.... Seriously, whats happened to VH? Her books are normally full of gutsy, fiery, bawdy heroines who don't take crap from anyone....

This "story" was alluring, exciting and witty. However it was tediously too detailed resulting in a VERY slow pace and boring read at times. The author was TOO detailed in that the characters were OVER dialoged. I don't know if this book went through a good editing process, because many of the scenes could have been easily summarized in a narrative paragraph as opposed to writing it into the character dialog. Having said this and analyzing the characters, our protagonists were a good match for one another. I totally fell in love with our hero, but at times I found him to be overly crazed and too lovesick over our heroine, and she knew that all too well. I appreciated the fact that he was determined to win the love of his girl no matter what, but the whole issue that led to their very rushed wedding was a bit too farfetched in my opinion. Also, even though I enjoyed our heroine's innocence and virtuous behavior, at times when she needed to put on her backbone and stand up for herself, she simply wouldn't out of fear and love for others; she was too much of a sacrificial lamb that really came out as lacking a backbone. Luckily our hero was too smart and sought answers for himself in order to get to the truth to all the issues that kept threatening to tear them apart. Having said this, our heroine lacked a bit of maturity as well.

I did not care for so many additional characters our author kept throwing into this story; it was really difficult to keep up with all of them and many didn't add any value - one thing was for sure, our heroine's sister and secondary character to this plot was too shallow, cold, heartless, self-centered and plain trashy and why she didn't appeal to me not one bit. Our heroine NEVER stood up to her sister when she needed to; she even had the audacity to name one of her children after this cold-hearted, manipulative, lying and unscrupulous woman. But I truly guess that our author would not have had much of a story if our heroine wasn't so beautifully delicate, demure, naïve and easily manipulated by others.

I read the excerpt to the next book "The Dark Earl" in this series (the daughter of the protagonists to this book), and although it does seem interesting, the characters seem to have too much of an age difference between themselves and I cannot possibly imagine what will actually bring them together in the end. Hopefully our author won't bore us to death with endless dialog and intricate details down to the very color of the raven that our heroine nursed back into flight -- (geez).

The historical romances of Henley's are a sweet treasure of the past. The Irish duke starts with the daughter of the last novel (The Decadent Duke). Lady Louisa of Bedford is a little girl with aspirations to become a dancer and meets a besotted James Hamilton, Lord Abercorn, who purposes right away, when they are still children! The tone is set with James, constantly enamoured of Louisa and her resisting due to fear of miscarriages. If you would like to read the entire review please visit [...]

I was so disappointed! The book was "choppy"...almost like a rough draft that she meant to go back and enrich with additional thoughts and descriptions. Instead, it was hard to keep the characters straight (there were WAY too many of them) as they had similar or identical names and no distinguishing "features". The only character that you could remember was the oldest sister, and that was only because she was promiscuous. I never "liked" any of the characters enough to CARE what happened to them...

i found this book to be completely boring. the only reason i finished it is because i had already invested money and time into it. i was disappointed because it had a lot of potential.

Having read other books by this author, I was predisposed to enjoy this one...until I started reading. I realize that is is fiction and therefore can take liberties with known facts, but five minutes' research would have corrected some of the more egregious errors. To depict Prince Albert as wanting to initiate an affair with the heroine flies in the face of thousands of pages of documentation. Also, Victoria's oldest daughter was Victoria, not Adelaide (none of her daughters was named Adelaide, except as a secondary name), and her oldest son was Albert Edward, called Bertie, not Teddy.

This is not your typical Henley thriller romance. It is a very sweet love story.