Reviews with content warning for Confinement - Bringing Down the Duke

Reviews tagging 'Confinement'

Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore

5 reviews

connerme's review

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adventurous emotional inspiring medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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wilybooklover's review against another edition

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emotional tense medium-paced

1.0

I wanted to like this so badly. A feminist historical romance should be right up my alley... but sadly the actual contents of the book were the very opposite of my preferences. A rare one star for me. There were some things I liked — the idea that being independent doesn't mean you don't also want someone to cherish you and care for you, the theme and depiction of great female friendship, the writing style — but ultimately they were not enough to save this for me. I think if you liked the relationship dynamics in Secrets of a Summer Night by Lisa Kleypas, then you will probably also like this. This book is really quite reminiscent of it in a lot of ways. If, like me, you hated Secrets of a Summer Night (particularly the hero) I'd give this one a miss.

To get the worst part out of the way first: the male lead was an absolutely insufferable, overbearing, entitled dick. The man is unremittently selfish, aggressive, constantly angry when he doesn’t get his own way (no idea why his brother is so afraid of him...), and has very little regard for the feelings or wishes of others. He's borderline if not outright abusive to his brother, although somehow that gets turned around in the end with the brother thinking he's all at fault for it. He contemplates kidnapping and raping the heroine, thinking to himself that he has enough power to get away with it, and because he doesn't do so he pats himself on the back and considers himself an honourable man (is the bar really that low? Are we supposed to applaud him for not being a rapist?). There are multiple instances where he disregards Annabelle’s own wishes and free will and forces her into doing what he wants. He admits to himself that asking her to be his mistress would be an abuse of his power, but then goes on to not only ask but try to pressure and manipulate her into it multiple times. He is constantly thinking of her as if she’s an object to be possessed rather than a person in her own right and doesn’t give a single fuck about what she stands to lose if she accepts his proposition. It's unthinkable to him to risk damaging his own reputation by marrying her, but he would be absolutely fine with her throwing away her reputation, friendships, and any chance at an education (her actual dream!) if she were to be his mistress. He genuinely doesn't care as long as he can get what he wants. To quote from the book, 'it was unfathomable that she wouldn't have him, that he would not get what he wanted most' — this is three quarters of the way through after the THIRD time she turns down being his mistress while he has not considered even once sacrificing anything for her. He barges uninvited into her accommodation despite being told there are no men allowed, once again not giving a single thought to the consequences she might face because of it (she gets kicked out the following day). He calls her a whore multiple times throughout the book, including when she's considering marrying another man as a last resort to save her reputation. How romantic! And even though it’s fictional, I really couldn’t get past him being a fucking Tory; that’s just a death knell right there. For about 90% of this book he is opposed to and actively refuses to fight for women's rights. One of the most genuinely loathsome heroes I’ve ever read. (But his brother acts like the nineteen-year-old that he is and he hasn’t got his family’s ancestral castle! Let me get out my tiny violin...)

Annabelle was not insufferable like the duke was, but everything we are told about her is contradicted in how she acts. We're constantly told how much smarter she is than everyone else, but she repeatedly acts like an idiot, makes stupid decisions, and gets herself into situations where she needs to be rescued by someone else. We're never actually shown her being intelligent beyond a few witty remarks. We're just supposed to believe it because she reads books and goes to Oxford. We're told that she can manipulate men for her own ends but this goes out of the window by chapter two. She tells us that she has learnt from her past mistakes of falling for a man but then immediately loses her head and falls under the lustful spell of virtually the first man she meets. Her views and morals are inconsistent and seem to be dictated purely by whatever the plot needs her to be.

I’m not usually fussed on books being historically accurate, like, at all, but this is truly one of the worst historicals I’ve read on that front: underwater archaeology some seventy years before it was actually developed, reading an English translation of Crime and Punishment several years before an English translation of the book even existed (the characters even note that it is 'all the rage' in London, a high achievement for a book that had yet to be published), and wearing clothing styles that literally did not exist in this time period, just to start. I'm as anti-Tory as it gets, and even I thought the portrayal of Benjamin Disraeli was a bit unfair and completely lacking in nuance. He was actually quite sympathetic to women's suffrage and the working class even if in a bit of a patronising way, and was also one of the few Conservative politicians who originally opposed the repeal of the Corn Laws, yet this book does not depict him that way at all. Queen Victoria is horrified in the book at the idea that the duke might want to give working men the vote next (the implication being that Disraeli would not), but Disraeli had already given a substantial amount of working class men the vote back in 1867 with a reform bill that he led. If you're going to name drop real people in a novel, you could at least portray them as somewhat true to life. Plus, the take on feminism read as especially modern and 'girl power' to me — to the point that I was genuinely expecting one of the characters so say ‘you go girl!’ or something. It was like modern White Feminism 101. But then at the same time the book is full of egregious gender essentialism and the ‘hero’ physically intimidating the heroine by using his size against her, being forceful with her, constantly grabbing and manhandling her while she struggles to get away from him. It's one thing if she tells him she's into it (different strokes for different folks and all that), but he has no idea — all he sees is a woman backing away from him and struggling in his grip and he has no qualm carrying on doing it, even seems to get off on it. At one point in the novel, Annabelle has to desperately resort to some cruel words to get him to back off since he doesn't understand the word 'no' and then later on she asks how he can still love her after she said such cruel things, as though he didn't say and do much crueller things to her throughout the entire book. There's a moment where another man refuses to take no for an answer (he also happens to be the hero of the next book, so clearly there's a theme in the male leads of this series) and the duke blames it on the way Annabelle is dressed and for 'flirting' with him. Men who don't care about consent and victim blame: the epitome of feminism!

On top of that, there is no exploration on the rights of women of colour or working class women or queer women — many of whom were at the forefront of the actual suffrage movement — only middle- and upper-class straight white women. The legal issue that the suffragists spend the entire novel focusing on is one that exclusively affects wealthy women. Annabelle is even put in a prison cell with a woman who's a pickpocket from the streets and panics about being in prison with 'real' criminals (even though she herself is equally guilty of breaking the law), seeming to consider herself better than the pickpocket without ever reflecting or having any empathy for someone who has to resort to stealing just to feed themself. They share the cell with a middle-class suffragist — guess which one Annabelle considers worthy of asking the duke to bail out and which one she leaves to the mercy of police officers she knows have no qualms about assaulting women, because it's 'common sense'? *If* you’re going to go throw historical accuracy out of the window anyway and the feminism already reads as modern, then why not just commit properly and with intersectionality? Not only that, but it was literally LESS intersectional than would actually be historically accurate! There were plenty of suffragists during the 1870s and 1880s (e.g. Catherine Impey, Helen Bright Clark, Josephine Butler) who were focused on things like anti-racism, anti-imperialism, racial equality, social justice for sex workers and poor women, etc. and considered those issues a key part of the movement. Many suffragists were openly queer and in romantic or sexual relationships with each other. Men of colour such as Dadabhai Naoroji were actively involved in and supported women's suffrage during this time period. The very first organisation focused on women's suffrage in the UK was founded by working class women, and the campaign for women's suffrage was rooted in and had close links with the abolition and antislavery movement. There is nary a mention of any of these things in the book.

And it’s not that I think that all romance novels should be explicitly feminist or even feminist at all, but given the marketing (and claims from both the publisher and author) I was expecting that this particular one would be — the title on Amazon even lists it as ‘Bringing Down the Duke: swoony, feminist and romantic.’ ...WHERE?! The heroine doesn’t even seem to care overmuch for women's suffrage — she is actually horrified when the duke makes a speech in their favour at the end because she's more concerned for his reputation than the cause — and only seems to be in it for her scholarship and her friends, so why is the feminist (a word that is used in the book but was not actually coined until around 15 years later) angle a selling point for the book? The political activism seems to have just been used merely as a plot device to keep delivering the heroine back into the arms of the duke — which is fine in a romance, just don't sell it to me as a feminist book featuring the plight of suffragists. It all felt very lacklustre and surface-level. Another reviewer has mentioned the racial implications in better detail, but I do also think it's weird that the single Jewish character (Disraeli) is derided as 'an upstart' and 'weaselling his way in' while the duke is described using the pseudoscientific/scientific racism term 'Nordic' and glorified for said 'Nordic' looks. I'm not even going to get into how the cartoon cover suggests a lighthearted, fluffy read and this is anything but because that is a whole other rant.

The linguistic inaccuracy was the final nail in the coffin for this book for me. Proper forms of address for the nobility is the most basic of basic research for a historical romance, surely, and yet it was frustratingly and continually wrong in this book. The characters in this book don't even address Annabelle correctly most of the time. Not to mention all the Americanisms and modern phrases and even numbers written incorrectly. To quote KJ Charles on this issue, 'you cannot write about a society if you don’t understand its rules; you can’t write a book about a heroine constrained by social stratification if you have no idea what the social strata even are; you can’t do a faux pas scene of the out-group heroine getting it wrong if none of the in-group are getting it right.'

Content Warnings