Julie Ann Long - What I Did For A Duke
Bad Dukes need love, too.
How insipid and flat everything seems after reading this book.
It is mostly about gambling, and the Duke is the biggest gambler of them all. You suck the air in and say: gambling is bad. But let me ask you: how would we feel anything, if it weren’t for gambling? And if you excuse a cheap cliché - passionate love is a gamble. Friendship is good and right. It’s like hard work, it’s worthwhile and admirable and it will never make you a millionaire overnight.
And if there is this certain yearning in your heart, you’re best to either go with it or get it out of your system fast and quick. Because you can’t have it both ways. Only Genevieve can, she is in a romance novel.
And she gets the Duke. The sardonic, intelligent, sensual Duke. Of all the Dukes I have read about (and there was a legion) he is the most complex and real. I want him to step out of this book and knock some sense OUT of my head.
Julie Anne Long could have made it easier. She could’ve let them both be passionate about art, she could’ve made the Duke softer, made Harry abhorrent, she could’ve made the story a lot less morally ambiguous. And I respect her for not doing that, not going the easy route and stripping the story of its raw power. After all, let’s remember (if you forgive me yet another cliché), love takes no prisoners.
