Bringing Down the Duke

Score: 2.5/5 Bookmarks

Thank you to Berkley Publishing for a free review copy of Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore. This is the author’s first novel and stars Annabelle Archer a brilliant woman who is born into the wrong time (1879) and is trying to find a way out of her uncle’s house to get herself an education and some independence.

There is love, mayhem, a fight for sufferage and of course a Duke. All things that I thought would make me love this book. But it fell short for me. It wasn’t terrible, but I just found it really difficult to actually like any of the characters or bring myself to care terribly much about what was happening in the book.

I tried reading the physical book, and when I just couldn’t seem to get into it I borrowed the audiobook from the library. Sadly, I did not enjoy Elizabeth Jasicki’s narration. I found her cadence to be really halting one moment, and then too fast the next, and the voice she used for the main character really grated on me.

Take a look at the synopsis, you might enjoy this one more than I did. If so, click the button below to get your own copy.

Synopsis:

A stunning debut for author Evie Dunmore and her Oxford Rebels, in which a fiercely independent vicar's daughter takes on a duke in a fiery love story that threatens to upend the British social order.

England, 1879. Annabelle Archer, the brilliant but destitute daughter of a country vicar, has earned herself a place among the first cohort of female students at the renowned University of Oxford. In return for her scholarship, she must support the rising women's suffrage movement. Her charge: recruit men of influence to champion their cause. Her target: Sebastian Devereux, the cold and calculating Duke of Montgomery who steers Britain's politics at the Queen's command. Her challenge: not to give in to the powerful attraction she can't deny for the man who opposes everything she stands for.

Sebastian is appalled to find a suffragist squad has infiltrated his ducal home, but the real threat is his impossible feelings for green-eyed beauty Annabelle. He is looking for a wife of equal standing to secure the legacy he has worked so hard to rebuild, not an outspoken commoner who could never be his duchess. But he wouldn't be the greatest strategist of the Kingdom if he couldn't claim this alluring bluestocking without the promise of a ring...or could he?

Locked in a battle with rising passion and a will matching her own, Annabelle will learn just what it takes to topple a duke....