Here's the basic storyline: the Duke of Avon, while in Paris, buys a random peasant boy he finds on the street to be his page. The boy, Leon, turns out to actually be a girl, Leonie, who's been forced to dress as a boy for years (starting to get weird, right?). He makes her his ward, his adopted daughter, and introduces her to Paris society and figures out about her family who she didn't know. The Duke is this terrible, evil person whom everyone calls Satan, but Leonie is totally devoted to him and thinks he's perfect. Eventually he falls in love with her too and after a bunch of stuff, they get married.
First off, the storyline is just too weird. She was dressed up as a boy for the first 100 pages of the book, and then you find out she's actually a girl. And then you find out she actually has good parentage and this whole crazy story behind her upbringing, which the Duke just figured out by just guessing. And secondly, the Duke of Avon is 20 years older than her, and her guardian, and this seriously bad guy, according to everyone, including his friends. He isn't the sort of person you want to root for, even after he starts helping Leonie out. I more wanted Leonie to fall in love with his younger brother, Rupert, who was much more human. And thirdly, Leonie was really pretty boring as a character. She was outspoken, and impish, and beautiful, but there really wasn't anything there for me to make me like her. I wouldn't really recommend this one as much as I would the other two Heyer novels I've read so far.
No comments:
Post a Comment