Review: How To Love A Duke in Ten Days

How To Love A Duke in Ten Days by Kerrigan Byrne
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Kerrigan Byrne's "How to Love a Duke in Ten Days" was not what I was expecting, and frankly left me rather disappointed. First of all, the title seemed indicative of a romantic comedy to me (perhaps because of its similarity to the movie "How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days"), but this book is in no way a comedy. More importantly, as pointed out by a number of other reviewers, there really should be a content/trigger warning in advance of the book's prologue. I was not prepared for the graphic nature of the opening scene, which is very dark and traumatic. After reading it, I had to put this book aside and read something happier until I was in the proper frame of mind to come back to it.

When I did finally come back to the book, there were a number of things about it that I found annoying, if not outright ridiculous. For example, I don't believe it's anatomically possible for Piers to have figured out that Alexandra wasn't a virgin in the way he supposedly did. Even if he could have done so, there are a lot of other explanations for what he discovered besides her trying to trick him into marriage to cover up being pregnant by another man, and it really irritated me that he wasn't even willing to consider any other possibilities. Piers acted like a total jerk about the whole thing, and it made me like him a lot less. Even though he claimed not to mind if Alexandra had taken a previous lover, he was clearly angry, and he seemed to blame her for "lying" to him when in fact Piers was the one who assumed she was a virgin. She never actually told him that she was.

In addition, there was a lot going on in this book, and I think it might have benefited from a more streamlined plot so that more of the focus could have been on building the relationship between Piers and Alexandra. I understand that this is the first book of a new series so some background was necessary, but I could have done without the info dump of all three of the girls' secrets in the prologue, for example. Each of them is going to get their own book, so there's plenty of time to share the other girls' stories later. Also, the resolution of the plot to harm Piers and Alexandra was overly complicated and involved too many players. I think one enemy would have been plenty for them to handle!

Finally, I just wasn't convinced about the depth of Piers and Alexandra's feelings for each other after such a short time together. This story really does unfold over a period of only ten days or so, and Alexandra and Piers held each other at arms' length for almost that entire time because they didn't know each other well enough to trust each other. Both of them were carrying so much baggage from their past hurts that I don't see how they could possibly have learned to trust or love each other in such a short period of time, even under the admittedly extreme circumstances.

At any rate, this was the first book I've ever read by Kerrigan Byrne, but based on my feelings about it, I'm not sure what it is about her writing that so many people rave about. It had its share of awkwardly constructed sentences just like any other book, and the plot wasn't any better than most of the other historical romances I've read. That said, I didn't completely hate it and would certainly try another one of her books in the future.

*ARC provided by the publisher via Edelweiss. All opinions expressed are my own.

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