Narrated by Susan Ericksen
How to Lose a Duke in Ten Days, the second book in Laura Lee Guhrke’s An American Heiress in London series, tells the story of a young woman who needs to marry quickly, but who doesn’t want a man in her life. Ever.
Edie Jewell is just nineteen, and is one of a number of immensely rich American heiresses searching the British aristocracy for a suitable husband. Unfortunately, she hasn’t met with success and she has only three more days before her she will have to return to New York with her father. Edie is desperate to stay in England because of the gossip she will face at home – and because she will have to face the man who ruined her.
The handsome young Duke of Margrave has only recently come into his title, but the debts run up by his father and grandfather mean that he is practically bankrupt. He wants nothing more than to leave it all behind and return to the life he has begun making for himself in Africa.
Knowing this, Edie makes Margrave – Stuart – an offer. If he marries her, she will pay all his family’s debts, manage his estates, deal with his scrounging relatives and provide him with a generous income for the rest of his life, but only on condition that he leaves England and never comes back. Stuart is surprised at both the offer and conditions, but having already decided to return to Africa, and having made sure Edie understands that once done, their marriage cannot be undone, he agrees.
But life has a way of altering the best laid of plans, and Edie is horrified when, after an absence of five years, and following a near-fatal injury, Margrave returns to England, and tells her that he wants to make a life with her. He gives his reasons eloquently and poignantly, but Edie is unmoved and refuses him outright, telling him she has no interest in a real marriage or having a family.
Margrave knows that his sudden reappearance must have come as a shock to Edie, but he doesn’t understand her desperation to have nothing to do with him and wants to find out why. He asks her to give them a chance – and proposes a deal. They will spend the next ten days together (ten days because Edie has booked passage to New York, sailing on the eleventh day) and if Stuart is unable to persuade Edie to kiss him within that time – that’s to initiate a kiss rather than respond to one – he will accede to her request for a legal separation. Having absolutely no intention of allowing him into her life, Edie is confident of the outcome and agrees.
Stuart knows he has taken on a Herculean task and that all the things he might normally have done to woo a lady will not work with Edie. Instead of attempting to seduce her, he decides to try to cement a friendship between them, hoping that he might also find a way to find a way to spark the passion he senses she is firmly keeping in check.
At first, Edie comes across as pig-headed and cold. She refuses to hear any of what Stuart is telling her or to see that he’s actually a kind, considerate man because she’s so completely focused on her own wants. Fortunately for her, it doesn’t take Stuart too long to put two-and-two together and to work out the reasons behind his wife’s fear of intimacy; the man who ruined her didn’t merely destroy her reputation, he raped her. I admit that I’m always a little wary of stories in which one of the protagonists has suffered sexual trauma, because I’m never sure how realistic the author’s solution is going to be. All I can say about it here is that Ms Guhrke’s resolution is certainly not outside the bounds of possibility, and she handles the subject in a sensitive manner.
The characterisation of both leads is excellent. Stuart is a terrific hero – not an alpha, not a beta, but with the best characteristics of each; self-confidence combined with sensitivity. He knows his time with Edie is limited and is determined to make every minute count, but even so, he doesn’t try to rush things, and focuses on what Edie needs rather than his own desires.
Susan Ericksen is a good choice of narrator for this series, as she’s an American who is capable of utilising and sustaining a British accent fairly consistently and who is able to switch between the two with a reasonable amount of ease. She’s a very experienced and talented vocal actress, and one of the things I enjoy about her narrations is the way in which she really brings out the emotions behind the story; sometimes she can go a little over the top, but for the most part, her performance here is consistent with the emotional content of the book.
But it took me a while to warm up to her characterisations of the two principals. Ms Ericksen’s voice sits naturally in the mezzo-soprano/alto range, meaning that performing male characters in a lower register isn’t a strain for her. Yet here, she has opted to differentiate between Stuart and Edie almost entirely by accent and performs them both in more or less the same register throughout, which I found a little disappointing. That said, however, as the story progresses, and Stuart and Edie begin to interact more, I started to hear the subtle differences she injects into her interpretations, and the emotional nuances beneath the words. Given that Stuart and Edie are at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum for a large part of the story, Ms Ericksen’s method of differentiation – through accent and expression – actually works well and by the end of the book, my earlier disappointment had disappeared.
The secondary characters – servants, lawyers, Edie’s sister and her governess – are all well characterised and easily identifiable. Another point in Ms Ericksen’s favour is that she’s someone who carries those aforementioned emotional subtleties into the narrative portions of the story, rather than confining them to the dialogue, which happens to be a personal preference in a narrator.
All in all, How to Lose a Duke in Ten Days is a well-written and touching love-story; and in spite of my early reservations about the narration, it’s an audiobook I’d certainly recommend to others.
Caz
Narration: B
Book Content: B+
Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in
Violence: References to sexual assault
Genre: Historical Romance
Publisher: Harper Audio
