THREE STARS
I’m sorry, but I despised Eliza. She was a lying, conniving ____ (use your own word here) in the worst of ways. She’s a member of this group of four women who write for the London Weekly called the Writing Girls, which thrived on gossip. The better the gossip, the more newspapers were sold, padding the pockets of Knightly, the editor. Her job was to get the scoop on the Duke of Wycliff who had recently returned from Tahiti and wasn’t the normal kind of duke. She gets a job as a housekeeper, which gave her all kinds of exposure to him, which she was running to her editor. Sales of the paper rose exponentially and a reward was offered for anybody who would reveal the true identity of W.G. Meadows.
Sebastian Digby, the Duke of Wycliff, is an unusual man. He’s got long hair, an earring, doesn’t wear a cravat or even fancy clothes, and has a tribal design for a tattoo on his chest. The dukedom is broke and he wants to lead an expedition to Timbuktu before another guy does. Since these articles are damaging his reputation (like he had a good one to begin with), he can’t find anybody to back him. He hated that his private life was being exposed in the newspaper and knew he had a “mole” in the house. He just didn’t know who it was. But this person was destroying his life all while he’s trying to figure out ways to either build back the dukedom or finance the expedition to Timbuktu.
I hated Eliza for what she did to him and when her conscience finally caught up to her, it was too little too late. She’d done irreparable harm to him. She should’ve been on her knees, groveling at his feet while begging for his forgiveness. She was just too self-centered and deceitful and there was no coming back from that. I didn’t feel any sort of love connection between these two because of her insidious behavior. She pretended to be his friend, which she definitely was not. Friends don’t do that to other friends. You can’t get true love out of a lie and she was the queen of liars.
Another thing that got me was she was supposedly an heiress. Well, somebody in your family has to die for you to become an heir or an heiress. Nobody died. Therefore, she was not an heiress. In addition to that, there were a few grammar errors (breath instead of breathe, a room was pilfered with candles…) that did interrupt the reading experience, but did not destroy it.
I liked Sebastian. I thought he was a down-to-earth kind of guy that didn’t follow the rules of society the majority of the time and wanted to break the reputation of the Wicked Wycliffs. The men all dallied with the household girls. Sebastian was Eliza’s boss and was attracted to her, but held back for a couple of reasons, one of them being the reputation thing. The other reason stunned me.
There were a few great plot twists that kept the story going, but I just could not condone the actions of Eliza. I disliked her intensely and never got to the point where I could even tolerate her let alone actually like her. There was just too much deception on her part and it trashed the book.
Hanging out with Kristi 