Romancing The Duke by Tessa Dare

Romancing The Duke
by Tessa Dare
Rating: 4 of 5 stars

My Review:
Tessa Dare books are always on my must read list. I think you pretty much can't go wrong with any of them. No matter if it's my favorite one or not, I never pick one up and then wonder if it's the best choice for right now. Within 10 pages, I'm completely hooked. This one was no different. Sadly, I didn't have four hours to read in one day, but the book was in my hand every chance I got.

Izzy is her own personal fairy tale. Pretty much nothing goes how she'd like but everything has some thread of familiarity to it. I found her to be very amusing and relatable. She took all the bad and transformed it into something good. She was the ultimate lemons-to-lemonade woman. She takes whatever she can get, grabs whatever loveliness she can, and allows herself to be whoever she needs to be. That sounds confusing, but really it was just that she was fine acting in certain ways to keep up the impressions of who she was. In some books, that might be annoying (and it was to Ransom for a while), but she was strong enough to own who she was but still play a role when she felt like it. She wanted to give everyone else the fairy tale because life can be magical.

Ransom is scarred and cynical, but he also wasn't one to deny his feelings. He's the reformed bad-boy that everyone would like. He's got brothel receipts a mile long, but hasn't been with anyone since his accident. Izzy brings him back to the land of the living, but really she taught him how to believe again. It wasn't her dragging him along, but instead she showed Ransom the magic of friendships and life and fighting for what you want.

Tessa Dare has been writing Spindle Cove novels for so long that it was hard to remember no one in this book came from that world. This book had it's own complete cast of secondary characters. I didn't necessarily like all of them. Some of them were rather self-absorbed and inconsiderate. They weren't bad, but they also didn't make me long to see their own happily-ever-after. Bad guys are given almost no page-time in this book. The characters take their time to work out what they want and how they'll get there and it doesn't have much to do with the villains, even though there is a mystery with dishonest characters.

When you need a book to carry you away into a different world, this is the book for you. Like watching a engaging movie, this book made me happy. I liked reading it and I reveled in watching Izzy and Ransom's story unfold.