Review of mostly great Regency romance Any Duchess Will Do by Tessa Dare

 

 Spoilers in this review

Any Duchess Will Do by Tessa Dare is a delightful Regency romance.  It's a My Fair Lady plot with a happy twist:  Heroine Pauline Simms, the struggling barmaid who doesn't pronounce her Hs, does not give up her identity to join the supposedly better upper crust.  Griffin York, the impossibly rich, debonair duke, does not leave that upper crust life entirely behind.  They meet in the middle, with the happiest of all possible happy endings:  Griffin gives away the larger part of his fortune and devotes his time to running the philanthropic organizations he founded.  Pauline runs a subscription library catering to women who want to read (joy!) smut.  

The main quibble I had with this book was Griffin's back story, which could have gone much further.  Griffin lived through a mysterious tragedy a year or so before the action in this book, which led him to vow never to marry or have children.  The big revelation was that   GIANT SPOILER GO BACK

 

 

this tragedy was that an opera singer he had been involved with had become pregnant, he had loved the baby, and she died at a week old.  

This was disappointing to me for a number of reasons.  First, the opera singer's plan had been to abandon the baby (and had Griffin not stepped  up to take her, to farm her out to some unknown family) while she returned to Europe.  As I posted here, the trope of mothers abandoning their children makes me crazy.

Until this reveal, I had thought that the back story was that the opera singer was a woman Griffin had loved and who had died in childbirth along with the baby.  This would have worked much better in the story.  It would have explained why Griffin was now afraid to love a woman, and was terrified to risk getting someone pregnant.  While infant mortality in and of itself is tragic, my version would have worked better for the story and for Griffin's character.

That said, the author's note at the end of the book erased a multitude of sins.  I love that Dare did research  into why Griffin's mother had miscarried three pregnancies after Griffin was born and had come up with a very specific medical explanation -- even though the information was not available to the characters. That' s world-building at its best.  

See my reviews of other books by Tessa Dare on these links: The Duchess Deal and The Wallflower Wager.