The Duke's Return by Malia Martin

 

Malia Martin is a vastly underrated Avon Romance author. Her medieval romance HER NORMAN CONQUEROR is one of my favorites. Unfortunately, she's only ever published four books (unless she has a penname I don't know about), so I've been putting off reading her backlist because once they're gone, they're gone (which is very toxic of me, I'm a bad reader, clearly). But STILL. You can never read something for the first time ever again, so I wanted to savor the opportunity.

THE DUKE'S RETURN is a very strange book. At first, I went into it thinking it was going to be a four- or five-star read but it ended up being repetitive, drawn-out, and confusing. That's not to say that it's a bad book, but it was kind of all over the place in the narration and the author made some interesting choices. (Not necessarily bad-interesting... just odd.)

***SPOILERS TO FOLLOW***

So first, the good:

✔️ Older heroine. The heroine is 34 and the hero is 28. That's a six-year age gap between the hero and the heroine, which I really liked because you don't really see that too often, especially not in historical romance. The hero is super into it too. He keeps telling her she reminds him of his old governess and at one point he's like, you want me to see you as a mother? LET ME SUCKLE YOUR NIPS. And I was like, whoa, easy there, tiger. Maybe he was a little too into it. But whatever. I stan a reverse age-gap.
✔️ Heroine is not a virgin. So many authors are fans of those "she's a widow-- but she's still got her V-card because he was too old to get it up!" trope. Not this heroine. She's a widow, who's done the time. She also suffered a child's death and a miscarriage. Her grief about this is not lingered on but feels real. I guess this is a content warning, if you're sensitive to that, but it's not a huge part of the book and she does end up having her rainbow baby, so it ends up feeling like a great HEA for her.
✔️ The hero has dyslexia. I liked the way his disability was presented, too, and how he tried to hide it. A lot of his bad behavior also stemmed from his trying to hide his disability, which I think is also true of kids in school who can't read and are too ashamed to ask for help. I saw a review calling him "slow," and I thought that was mean because you can be very smart in other ways, even if you struggle with reading; it's a disability, for God's sake. I liked seeing that rep in this book.
✔️ Gothic vibes. The heroine is trying to get the hero married because allegedly his estate is under a Romany curse (note: the book does not use the word Romany). So this whole curse is hanging over the estate and all of the townspeople are super weird about it. It's actually not that sinister, but the heroine takes it so seriously that it almost feels like it's a self-parody. Whatever, I think I liked it.
✔️ Surprisingly mature handling of OW drama. There is an OW who was the side-bitch of the heroine's dead husband. They don't like each other but at the end of the book they have a conversation about wanting to do what's best for their kids/the legacy, and I thought it was just a really mature discussion and a rich portrayal of how you can not like someone but still understand where they're coming from. You don't see that a lot in older hist-roms so I wanted to give that a shout-out.

Now the bad:

❌️ The romantic scenes were incredibly repetitive. I'll give you a taste of what they were like. Hero makes an aggressive sexual overture. Heroine gives into it for half a second. "Oh, no, we mustn't!" "I'm the fucking duke, kiss me!" "No, you arrogant swine!" Heroine storms out. Hero hates life. Rinse, repeat. It got to the point where I was like, I SWEAR TO GOD IF THERE'S ANOTHER INTERRUPTION, I'M DUCT-TAPING THEM TOGETHER, CROTCH-FIRST.
❌️ I didn't really get the impression that the hero was all that committed. I just read another book about a reformed fuckboy noble called WHAT ALES THE EARL but at least in that book, the hero was super gung-ho about being a family man. This hero was perfectly willing to marry another woman, right up to the day of the fucking wedding, when she calls it off because she's in love with someone else. He didn't do that. He was gonna marry some other woman for propriety. What a turn-off.
❌️ Way too many side characters I didn't care about. There's having a colorful cast, and then there's letting the colorful cast steal the story. I felt like the latter happened here. There were just way too many frigging characters. Also, there's a sort of villain whose comeuppance is a throwaway line in the epilogue. That isn't very satisfying. Especially when it feels like the story is building up in a way that's going to hint at some last-act conflict.
❌️ The epilogue was so flipping weird. It was like reading one of those weird Jude Deveraux books from her "it's the '90s so what the fuck" phase. She churned out some weird books and this epilogue felt like it was right out of that. It's set in the present day, which is when we learn that the duke commissioned a portrait with his duchess because they were so in love and also, by the way, the bad guy was murdered by pirates because the hero fixed the Romany curse with a "Romany blessing." Ok.

For 50%-60% of this book, I was like YAAASS. And then the last 50%-40%, I skimmed. I still liked it and it did a lot of things right, but it was also super weird. I wish it was more gothic and the hero had been more obviously in love with the heroine (and maybe less with her body) and if maybe about half of those interrupted foreplay scenes were cut out and there was a real fight with the baddie.

Then, this could have easily been a four- or five-star book. YMMV.

3 out of 5 stars