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A review by falulatonks
Dukes Prefer Blondes by Loretta Chase
3.0
3.5 stars - My library app says I first started reading this in February 5th, which means that every time I've thought "I'd better get back to the book I was reading" for the last month, I came to this and struggled! On the romance note alone, I would've had no problem with reading this - it's charming, and Clara and Raven are pretty wonderful together, and the way they fight and fight for each other was fun and added an edge I'm not used to seeing in romance. They also felt really evenly matched in a way I loved - not just in terms of their intelligence and love for each other, but also their negative traits, where things you know would aggravate any other person just makes them even more lovable in each other's eyes. I LOVED that. Both of them knowing, too, that they're absolutely the best for each other, and that they would be happy together, adds such a nice confidence to their romance - no self-sacrificing melodrama, despite the differences in their stations, essentially. They're both really whole people in a way that works? And, you know, the courtroom trial scene was fucking perfect.
But the plot in this was just...irritating - exhausting, meandering, not at all compelling. Around halfway in, we started getting sections from the POV of the bad guys and that's when I put this aside for like two weeks. Even earlier in, when we saw them bonding over a plotty bit - even as I thought, 'hey, this is why they're great together', I was finding it hard not to tune out to the meat of it. It felt like too much coming in so many directions, and at such a disservice to characters I otherwise really enjoyed and whose individual stories had enough to fuel a novel on their own. I honestly think I only even finished this book because I skimmed over the plotty parts to get to their scenes together after they got married.
I did like that we got time with them after their marriage, where we get to see them fight and adore each other in full, but if I hadn't liked them together so much, this would've been a DNF.
But the plot in this was just...irritating - exhausting, meandering, not at all compelling. Around halfway in, we started getting sections from the POV of the bad guys and that's when I put this aside for like two weeks. Even earlier in, when we saw them bonding over a plotty bit - even as I thought, 'hey, this is why they're great together', I was finding it hard not to tune out to the meat of it. It felt like too much coming in so many directions, and at such a disservice to characters I otherwise really enjoyed and whose individual stories had enough to fuel a novel on their own. I honestly think I only even finished this book because I skimmed over the plotty parts to get to their scenes together after they got married.
I did like that we got time with them after their marriage, where we get to see them fight and adore each other in full, but if I hadn't liked them together so much, this would've been a DNF.