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Joana_Varela
, April 30, 2019
(view all comments by Joana_Varela)
I received an eARC at no cost from the author, in exchange for an honest and voluntary review. Thank you.
3.75*
I’m going to be completely and utterly honest with you: I was a bit afraid to read this book. If you follow this amazing author on social media, you might know her husband, Warren, passed away on February 2018. I had the immense pleasure to meet this lovely couple in person (thank you again, Madeline, for visiting Lisbon!) and had dinner with them in an informal setting. And, of course it is a dream come true to meet one your favourite authors, but I would also like to mention how sweet and caring Warren was.
And so, what do you do when your “best friend, [your] great love, and biggest supporter” (Madeline's Facebook Post https://www.facebook.com/MadelineHunter/...) passes away? I can only imagine how hard that must be, and how hard it must be to continue to write beautiful love stories.
So, yes, I was a bit apprehensive to read Madeline’s new book, simply because I was afraid such an event could have changed the way she wrote/expressed those love stories. Thankfully, I didn’t need to be.
Never Deny A Duke was a great book. It had the right amount of romance, a good plot line that introduced the characters and circumstances in a way that was easy to follow and to make us fall in love with such characters.
Eric and Davina had different purposes in their lives, and at some point that collided. And here’s where the story starts, with a land dispute. And all could be solved (in a male point of view, of course) with a simple arranged marriage that would take care of everything. But Davina isn’t a fool, and Eric isn’t interested. And even when that interest changes for both of them, Davina’s pursuit of the truth doesn’t, which was the thing I most liked about her.
Stories that mix Scots and English are always fun, simply because they may share a country, but they are, in their true essence, very different types of people. Our Scottish heroine Davina MacCallum, is fighting for what she believes to be her inheritance, and our British hero, Eric Marshall, the Duke of Brentworth, is fighting for what he believes to be rightfully his – even if it is something that has its own (dark) baggage.
I loved how the couple looked together for the truth, in a forced proximity kind of scenario, and how that allowed them to understand each other better, and to develop and attraction, and later on a lasting, loving relationship.
A great book that ticked almost all of the right boxes.
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