The Duke Undone
By: Joanna Lowell / Narrated By: Mary Jane Wells
Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
Wonderful wonderful wonderful—deSPIte some toe curling, there was just a surprising amount of depth!
April was looking like a mighty gloomy month over here in our household what with the last push to end a fraught school year having no more breaks to go and a veritable DEARTH of Covid vaccines in Texas (Our governor haaaaates our city, has his departments sending to red rural counties rather than populous ones who haaaaate him right back…. wait, so sorry, off m’ soapbox and now back to review…. ). But things took an abrupt upturn when I spied The Duke Undone as a New Release. Okay okay okay, not my usual Regency fare what with the sensibilities being Victorian, what? -but- with the absoLUTEly irresistible Mary Jane Freaking Wells as narrator.
Uhm, need I say it, what with my SHAMEless fawning all over the woman, that I was soooo THERE with a credit?
But at first, I must tell you, I was wondering how on EARTH a historical romance could clock in at 12 1/2 hours. I mean, that’s a LOT of clever banter, right? How on earth (again!) was the rest of it to be filled? Turns out? With an extraordinary amount of challenging situations. And by that, I don’t mean that the Hero and heroine get into slapstick scrape after slapstick scrape, but their growth as individuals are challenged and stimulated throughout the entirety of the story.
Lucy Coover has taken herself off the marriage mart and is instead seeking her soul through art. She’s one of (very) few women allowed in the Royal art school, and her ilk are NOT kindly accepted. As a matter of fact, the deck has been stacked against women in that they’re not allowed into classes for Life Drawing—of COURSE women should never be allowed to see the body nude! This rankles Lucy and her (Truly marvelous) friend Kate, who’ve a petition circulating to let women have Life Drawing classes.
So when Lucy, out slumming it in a dire neighborhood, steps upon what she first assumes is a (VERY naked) dead body of a man, she’s initially horrified, but then? ExHILarated! Look at the form! The musculature! The sinews. Not until she looks and looks and looks until she’s committed the body, the color, the FACE (tho’ the eyes are closed cuz the godlike creature is dead stinkin’ drunk) to memory, does she remove her shawl and cover his nether regions, paying an urchin to watch the body so that no harm might befall the man, at least no FURTHER harm can come to him. Whenst at home, his image comes to mind and inspired beyond belief, she paints her masterwork. Alas, Lucy and her aunt are somewhat impoverished, and she has to sell her beloved painting to cover bills and a new sewing machine.
Then we come to Anthony Philby, the Duke of Weston, who’s just been accidentally shot (This after surviving brutal campaigns in Afghanistan where he escaped with his life) because an irate husband thinks the Duke has seduced his wife. The proof? A painting, if you must know, of the Duke EVER soooo unclothed, that the cuckolded man’s wife had ordered for her own bedroom. MUCH befuddled, Anthony, who deeeearly wishes to slash the painting to shreds, instead removes it from the nails, rolls it up, and takes it with him to be destroyed. He now has to find one L. Coover, the artist, to see if that man has sketches or other images of him.
And so the pair meet and soon, after blackmailing Lucy, she sends him all of her much-prized sketches. And soon, Lucy has to seek Anthony’s help when the block she lives on is slated for demolition and to be used for the purposes of the rich on high.
There’s a lot of the politics of the day, of the corruption and mismanagement that I found very interesting. And there’s a lot of the damage done by the military mishaps of the day also. That Anthony suffers from PTSD and self-medicates with alcohol? Oh, I’m all over that. But what I found to be the best part was that both Lucy and Anthony are flawed creatures that author Joanna Lowell takes her time with. Situations arise without and within, each challenging the two to become their best selves. Lucy seeks a future of independence, free from the slavery of marriage, so she’s vastly disheartened as her thoughts turn to the Duke more and more. And she can see he’s one devastatingly daMAGed man, and who wants to carry THAT around for a lifetime?
Anthony? He knows he’s a layabout, but Lucy challenges him to be awake to himself, to see if he can actually be SOMEone, someone respectable. He’s dealing with feelings of worthlessness brought about by a lifetime of derision and abuse from a harsh father, and he’s learning the hard way that p’raps those he’s found comfort and fatherly care from miiiiiiight not be what they seem. There’s betrayal upon betrayal, and Anthony has to have his wits about him if he’s to deal with it all, and that means he canNOT be the dissipated drunk he believes himself to be. Yup, gotta get off the sauce, and that’s no easy feat. THAT is hard stuff, plus he has to look at his past and come to grips with it, even as he seeks to rectify what he can, letting go of what he must, pursuing that which cannot be ignored.
There’s a Happily Ever After that almost left me in tears. Aaaaaalmost, but not quite; tears for Romances are judged by my response to B. Metzger’s An Angel for the Earl which left me devastated and overjoyed all at the same time. Nope, no tears, but DEFinitely a lump in my throat for two characters who made hard choices and who faced a future that was brilliantly eccentric, with aaaaaalllll the pitfalls that THAT would bring to them.
And Mary Jane Freaking Wells? Oh my good golly gosh! She had me from the first sentence, as she always does. Author Lowell’s words run to the witty, and the way Ms. Freaking Wells delivered them had me grinning, chuckling, laughing aloud with wild abandon. My husband always checks up on me when I listen to one of her performances because he’s usually taken aback by me sitting by myself with a delighted grin on my face, still oh so still, unTIL I burst into gales of laughter. Ms. Freaking Wells’s voice runs from light to deep, a bit on the throaty side which makes our urbane and dissipated Duke a true wonder, but she also manages Lucy with her madcap activities and her wry and intelligent observations with great aplomb. I dooooo soooo love a narration by this woman, and yessssss….
This audiobook? with a topnotch standout performance? A couple o’ toe curling sex scenes but nothing toooo graphic, -BUT- it all made this April soooo much more delightful!
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