Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Duke/hero: "Stay away from me, country girl. I am the architect, not the fool. I plan and people follow. Do you understand?" He says this a few scenes before he's spying through keyholes and "wriggling his buttocks" (author's words) for the edification of a literally drooling maid and a few transfixed male servants. The Duke: "You are exactly like a mosquito...an annoying little bug, and I wish I could bring my hands together and splat! Squish you like an insect." Don't we all wish for that? In this story the hero (using the term loosely) is a boring boor with exactly zero interesting qualities. The "heroine" is an idiot. She gets drunk and acts like a two-year-old over dinner "grinning foolishly" (this is from her own perspective) and saying stupid things. I would have cringed in embarrassment, but I really wasn't that involved in these bad caricatures of "madcap" characters. The writing itself is sub-par. There is way too much dialogue that's lacking in character tags or description. There is no sense of the time, not to mention the anachronistic terms like diddly-squat. Then there's the huge background information dump that the heroine "blubbers" (author's word) to the potrait of her dead mother. This goes on for pages. Then we have lines like this: "The duke turned puce in his rage." There's more puce prose like this throughout this agonizingly long book. Okay, I admit I did a lot of skipping, especially after the transvestite is cordially welcomed into the very conservative duke's household. (Not kidding.) Among other "endearments" the duke calls the heroine a"halfwit" (meaning it). By the time I finished this book I felt he was giving her too much credit. Unless you're a fan of shows where people laugh uproariously when other people get hurt and guffaw when characters make fools of themselves with dopey grins, I'd recommend you not spend money or time on this book.