I did not really like it :/ very enlightening about the horrors of 18th century prostitution though! the romance was not believable at all, unfortunately, but I still love you forever, Jane Feather.

eh needed and epilogue
. they never said the "i love you" that is typical in historical romances

From my previous list- book

This book was a little different than what I normally read but it was better than I expected. It had a good hook to find out how the book was going to end. The book ended amazingly which was really unexpected because it didn't seem like it was going to end up the way it did. As you can tell I really liked the ending of the book. I knew that Redmayne was going to do the right thing in the end. He made the story that much better because he was a total gentlemen even though he didn't have to be but he was intruded with Juliana which made sense because she was a really good main girl character.

This was a story of a woman in the 1700s England and how little choice they have. Juliana is a woman who is married to a man at least 30 years older than her. On her wedding night, something goes horribly wrong. She escapes to London, where there is not much choice for a single 17 year old woman, with the clothes on her back. Then she meets the Duke of Redmayne, Tarquin and her life takes an interesting turn. It is a very detail orientated story and I enjoyed it.

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14543589

Feather tries to present some of the horrors women faced in London of the mid-eighteenth century, but it never quite seems real to me. For one thing, Our heroine is in a ritzy house of prostitution at one point, and is told that no one there gets the pox, or any other sexually transmitted disease, because they and their clients are all "very clean," which is just ludicrous. A hundred years later, a New York City study indicated that most prostitutes only lasted a decade or two, most of them taken out by disease and the "slow suicide" of alcohol and drugs, and I think it very unlikely it was better in London of the 1750s.

I like the heroine of this book, but her only real flaws are that she's clumsy and she's a soft-hearted idiot. At one point she tries to organize the prostitutes of London into a trade union, a highly impractical plan at the very least. And even though she knows there's a guy looking to grab her and haul her away for nefarious reasons, she keeps running off and getting caught by the bad guys or ending up in some other sort of trouble. The hero is one of those imperturbable and apparently heartless Dukes who always know how to manage things that populate an enormous percentage of Regencies. He's not particularly interesting but gets the job done.

I like the Duke's brother, who feels sorry for the heroine and recognizes some of the wrongs being done around him, however he's woefully worthless and can't even solve his own problems, let alone offer the heroine anything but a bit of emotional support. No, that's not entirely fair -- he does tell the hero some home truths and stand up to him, so while he doesn't solve his problems, there is a sense where he is crucial to the solution. Sadly, most of the secondary characters never rise above types, and some of the prostitutes don't even really reach that level, blending entirely in my brain into an amorphous mass.

This was one of the first romances I read and liked after I discovered the All About Romance website, which actually had legit reviews by thinking people (prior to that all the romance review sites I'd run across might as well have been advertising sites -- no longer the case, thank goodness), and a few scenes actually stuck in my brain all these years, meaning I remembered it with fondness.

And I am fond of it, for no very good reason. It pushes my buttons, for one. I like a lot of historicals where the heroine is coerced into an on-going sexual situation she does not want but decides to put up with for whatever reason; rape, by modern standards, but also a shockingly common situation for women throughout history. And I like to see a woman who was completely helpless rise above the bad guys, even if she has to rope some Duke in to make it happen.

I just couldn't with this book, the FMC was basically tstl, the whole plot hinged on her doing stupid impulsive things

I'm never ever going to go against my better judgment and ignore reviews again. Seriously, the notes I made throughout this whole book mostly consists of 'stupid, stupid, STUPID'. Everyone in the book keeps going on about how smart and quick-witted the heroine is, but I failed to catch even a single example of a reasonably well-thought-out decision, much less anything particularly clever. Her lack of self-awareness is appalling; she has completely no notion of her own faults and barely grows as a character by the end. Then again, I can't blame her because it seems everyone else in the book is just as blind to her silliness. This book is full of idiots.

Nasty personalities as her previous guardians had been, I wondered for a moment if they didn't have something there in their distaste for the heroine.

Read in 4/22
So much darker than most of her books. I loved it!

cute story overall, fun era romance novel

Uncomfortable most of the time. Yet intriguing in it’s own way.