Bringing Down the Duke

Bringing Down the Duke- Evie Dunmore
Berkley/Penguin Group
Release Date: September 3, 2019

Rating:
📚📚📚

Synopsis: England, 1879. Annabelle Archer, the brilliant but destitute daughter of a country vicar, has earned herself a place among the first cohort of female students at the renowned University of Oxford. In return for her scholarship, she must support the rising women's suffrage movement. Her charge: recruit men of influence to champion their cause. Her target: Sebastian Devereux, the cold and calculating Duke of Montgomery who steers Britain's politics at the Queen's command. Her challenge: not to give in to the powerful attraction she can't deny for the man who opposes everything she stands for.

Sebastian is appalled to find a suffragist squad has infiltrated his ducal home, but the real threat is his impossible feelings for green-eyed beauty Annabelle. He is looking for a wife of equal standing to secure the legacy he has worked so hard to rebuild, not an outspoken commoner who could never be his duchess. But he wouldn't be the greatest strategist of the Kingdom if he couldn't claim this alluring bluestocking without the promise of a ring...or could he?

Locked in a battle with rising passion and a will matching her own, Annabelle will learn just what it takes to topple a duke....

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Annabelle Archer, destitute and living on her cousin's charity as an unpaid house drudge, gets the opportunity to become one of the first women accepted to Oxford.  She is offered a stipend to attend in exchange for supporting a women's suffrage movement.  When handing out pamphlets causes her to meet Sebastian, Duke of Montgomery, things quickly spiral out of control.  Trying to convince Montgomery to support the movement brings her into a world of house parties, Christmas dinners, and high company she isn't sure how to handle- and a stubborn, blue-blooded duke she knows she shouldn't fall in love with.  When they keep getting thrown together, can passion overcome society's obstacles or will they both be restricted by their duties?

Bringing Down the Duke is a debut novel by Evie Dunmore and has been getting a lot of advance hype.  I have to admit it's a hard book for me to review because I'm not really sure how I felt about it- or whether I even liked it.  It has some of the standard tropes I count on to make a good plot/conflict: our hero is a duke on a mission to get back his ancestral home and rebuild the fortunes that his father gambled away, our heroine is a poor commoner trying to earn independence.  He instantly misjudges her as an opportunist out to get money and/or marry into the nobility.  She has some baggage about nobility in her past and isn't very impressed by overbearing men.  He expects to say 'jump' and have people ask 'how high?' while she is more likely to look him in the eye and ask 'why should I?'  The book also focuses on a time period and subject that don't usually get highlighted in romance novels: the 1879 women's suffrage movement and attempting to repeal the Married Women's Property Act. Annabelle is a smart woman who (rightfully) resents having to live off the charity of her stupid cousin- especially when that charity means she's allowed to live in his house and work as an unpaid servant and have no life of her own. She sees the chance to go to Oxford and study ancient Greece as a step towards gaining independence.  So far, so good. It's after that that things got a little shaky for me.

For one thing, it was hard for me to get a good idea of what Annabelle wanted with her life.  Ok, she doesn't want what she has now and she wants to be treated with some respect and have a say in her own life.  But I never got a real sense that she had a goal past that. She studied ancient Greece because that's what her father studied and taught her and she was good with Latin and Greek.  Was it fascinating to her? Did she have a drive to go to archaeological sites and do her own research and present her own theories? I don't know.  Was she interested in getting an education so she could go back home and be a paid governess of the local gentry? That's what she says in order to go, but probably wasn't really the plan. I never got a sense she had a goal in mind.  Did she really care about the suffrage movement? You get the feeling at first that the answer is no: she participates because that's what it takes to keep her stipend.  Was she interested in the movement and applied because of that? Where did she hear about the stipend in the first place? Maybe not important things but it all made me question how deeply we were getting to see her.  She does argue the logic of why a woman should be able to keep her property on marriage and gets in the face of anyone who suggests that she isn't a man's intellectual equal but takes that as a personal attack instead of for women in general.  

Sebastian is pretty closed off for the whole book.  You know what he wants: to get his ancestral seat back, to restore his family's good name and fortune, to have his younger brother do what he's told, and to have Annabelle as a mistress.  The more time he spends with her, the more he wants her- probably because she is one of those rare people who treats him as a person and not a duke.  He admits if she were more his social equal he'd marry her, but sees nothing wrong or insulting with saying that since that isn't the case, she should be his mistress.  He's insulted she doesn't see this as a great opportunity, since she clearly is attracted to him.  It's an attitude he carries through pretty much the whole book and with all his interactions with everyone: I know best, I am the best, don't question me. That makes it really hard to like him.  

There is a lot of angst and longing because of the obstacles in the way of Sebastian and Annabelle's happily ever after.  Secondary characters are mostly flat and unknowable.  Some, like Sebastian's brother Peregrine, are completely unlikable (he's the party-going frat boy type who rebels against the idea of taking up any responsibility by acting like a spoiled brat of 5 and running away from home when his brother signs him up for the Navy at the rather improbable age of 19). 

The writing is choppy, especially in the beginning. Things would go from fine to awkward: Sebastian would be getting address as Your Grace and then suddenly getting called "Duke", Annabelle would suddenly be speaking or thinking far too modernly, and (while I'm no expert) her clothing styles seemed to me more 1812 than 1879.  Maybe these are mistakes that could be explained away as being a writer's first novel, but they made things jarring for me.  On the other hand, I did keep reading and hoping for some kind of a happy ending.  And (spoiler alert) while it happens far too fast and improbably conveniently, in the end our heroes do get there.  Whether I liked the journey enough to read the next book in the series Dunmore comes up with, I'm not sure.

I was up and down on this book, but there is potential in it.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review