Reading: The Duchess War

[white_hart]

I downloaded a copy of Courtney Milan's The Duchess War about five years ago, when the kindle edition was being offered for free. Although I was very much not a romance reader, several friends of mine had spoken highly of Milan's books and I thought it was worth a try, but I ended up bouncing off hard and abandoning the book about 20% of the way through after encountering a scene recounting the hero's graphic sexual fantasy about the heroine, who he'd only just met, which pinged all of my Oh Hell No buttons*.

Given that I have made a few ventures into reading romance recently I thought I'd give The Duchess War another try, although as all the other romances I've read were (a) f/f and (b) combined romance with fantasy, mystery or both, it was my first straight romance in both senses of the word. I liked it better this time. I still found the hero's graphic fantasising a bit squicky, though on persevering I found that later on the heroine also fantasises about the hero which made me feel a bit better about it. I wasn't entirely convinced by the Victorian setting, though as I'm not an expert in the period it's entirely possible that some of that is actually down to the Tiffany Problem rather than actual inaccuracies (but would a duke, however radical his views, really decide that distributing handbills encouraging workers to unite in the struggle for better conditions was the best way for someone with money and connections to go about pushing for change?), but the plot was entertaining and had some interesting surprises along the way, and the more I read, the more sympathetic and engaging I found the characters (I was also pleased to note that there is a background f/f relationship). There's some enjoyable banter between the hero and heroine, and although there are more explicit sex scenes than I was expecting or than I'm comfortable with (both more sex, and more explict) and at one point I was slightly worried that the whole of the last third of the book was going to be sex, that turned out not to be the case and the sex scenes were easy enough to skip over. I don't know if I will seek out more of Milan's books, but I quite enjoyed The Duchess War this time through and if you like romance and are more comfortable with explicit depictions of heterosexual sex than I am I think you'd probably like it a lot.

* 'Overly graphic descriptions of male sexual fantasies about women' is also the reason I bounced off the Dresden Files, although oddly enough I can cope with Peter Grant who a lot of people make similar complaints about.

Comments

[girlyswot]

If you were interested in more of her books, I would recommend The Countess Conspiracy. It has a secondary f/f romance, a strong focus on consent, and an extraordinary mother-daughter relationship, as well as writing women scientists back into the history books.

[white_hart]

Thanks - I see that’s focused on two of the secondary characters from this book, too, and I did rather like them.

[girlyswot]

No, wait, I think I'm wrong about the f/f romance. I think that's in the next book in the series.

[mountainkiss]

It’s not much of a romance. They’re not together and then they are.

[sartorias]

yeah, don't go to Milan for period correctness. (I forget if it was that one or another in which I found five errors on the first page.) But for a hilarious voice and plenty of banter as well as exuberant lust, she can't be beat.

[white_hart]

Because I don’t have an in-depth knowledge of the period, I just kept coming across things and thinking “that doesn’t sound right” (and at one point ended up doing a Wikipedia dive into railway history which established that in 1868 the characters probably would have got the train from Euston if they were going to Leicester, as direct trains from St Pancras didn’t start until the following year, but they would have had to change at Rugby). I did, however, roll my eyes hard at a mention of a character’s needles clacking as she darned a sock, because that’s not how darning works...

I enjoyed the banter, but I think your “exuberant lust” is my “more explicit sexual content than I’m really comfortable with”, which is probably the thing that is most putting me off reading more.

[ankaret]

Did I tell you about the amount of time I spent trying to work out exactly how Southampton Central station looked at the turn of the twentieth century for Anna Chronistic, only to discover that the boat train went to a completely different and now defunct station at Southampton Docks? Thank goodness for multiple timelines. (Which also explain why Uncle Sheng though he and Polly could sail to the USA in 1895 despite the draconian Chinese Exclusion Act)

[el_staplador]

I was thrown by one recently which had Queen Victoria travelling to Osborne House via a station at Gosport - correctly, as it turned out - but then invented a corps of motorcycle couriers for the Boer War. (Though I DNFed before we got to the Boer War because the dialogue was so howlingly *wrong*. )

[perennialanna]

Though someone could write PERFECTLY ACCURATELY about my great-grandfather's First World War service and be howled down, because it is utterly implausible.

He joined the Royal Naval Air Service. He found himself in their Armoured Car (yes, really) Division. As a motorcycle courier. In Turkish Armenia*, immediately before massacre season began. Somewhere around here he developed a dodgy appendix (his service record lists him as having two appendectomies, which intrigues), at which point he had to be evacuated by train the length of Russia, departing via Archangel. Winston Churchill comes into it somewhere, and when i tell the story to military historians of the right period their eyes light up.

*As noted for its coastline as Bohemia...

[alithea]

I bounced off the Dresden Files for the same reason but Rivers of London doesn't bother me either - I think it's because I never get the impression that Peter doesn't respect women and consider them his equal, whereas something about the tone of the others make me think both the character and the *author* could do with a good slap!

[white_hart]

Yes, I think I agree with that - Peter sees women as people, even if he is often also very aware of their physicality, whereas with Dresden it felt much more othering.