One Night with the Duke is a novel by Susan Golden.
Finished on: 8.6.2023
[I won this book in a LibraryThing Early Reviewer give-away.]

Content Note: threats of rape, misogyny

Plot:
Having run away from home, Miss Emma Poundstone is trying to survive in London, at least until she is coming of age in a few months. But it’s not particularly easy for a young, unaccompanied woman. As she is trying to sell her father’s snuff box to get through the next months without starving, Giles, Duke of Wexham, swoops into the pawnshop and buys it from her. And then he quite literally swoops her off her feet when she faints from hunger. Giles is determined to take care of Emma, but whether Emma is willing to let go of her pride and her reputation to let herself be taken care of is an entirely different question.

One Night with the Duke is a rather nice read as long as you don’t expect too much historical accuracy. There were a couple of pacing issues and Giles didn’t quite convince me as a love interest, but I enjoyed reading about him and Emma.

I am not a huge expert in the field of regency romances but I got the feeling that One Night with the Duke is deeply entrenched in the genre and will provide connoisseurs with familiar tropes and expected thrills, although the story also has unusual elements – especially, as far as I know, the fact that Emma (at the beginning of the book, Emma is once referred to as Amanda or Amalia – I assume a name change later in the game that kind of stuck around) and Giles actually enter into an agreement where she becomes his mistress.

Going into the book, I knew that with the power differential between the two and Emma literally relying on Giles for her survival, it very much depended on the execution of the story whether it would become a story of questionable consent and ickiness, or one where Emma could be her own person and make decisions that also counter Giles’ wishes. The book falls somewhere in the middle, I’d say. It never really convinced me of Emma’s power in the situation (and Giles did some rather problematic things, too), but it gave her enough agency for me to be able to go along with things.

It was a lot harder to believe some of the social things for me, like when Giles takes Emma to all of the fanciest balls and nobody but the biggest bitches seem to take exception to that (unfortunately, Giles is full off “all high society women are horrible” misogyny that is never really adressed in the book). And when he finally proposes to Emma and marries her, I couldn’t really believe that they would be able to do that either – it would have been more realistic for me if they had discovered some important relations of Emma’s to allow for that.

That being said, the book is well-written enough, even when it takes a couple of extra narrative turns that should have been cut in my opinion, and Emma and Giles are likeable enough, as are the supporting characters, to make the book a good read that is easy to breeze through. I enjoyed myself for the most part, even if I probably won’t be rushing out to buy the next book by Golden.

Summarizing: a fine read.