Author: Courtney Milan
Original Title: The Duchess War
Release Year: 2012
Literary Genre: Romance
Setting: England, victorian age
Series: 2° of The Brothers sinister series
Vote: 9/10
I liked it very much, especially the
characters and the last seventy/eighty pages, they are splendid.
In the first part we find nice and
entertaining moments but there are others which mostly fill the plot,
mind you, they aren't boring but neither amazing. I must say though
that with the second part the recovery is surprising.
For those who haven't already read the
first novel of The Brothers Sinister (The governess affair), aka
the prequel to all the series stories, everything revolves around the
Duke of Clermont.
In The
duchess war (settled almost
thirty years later the events of The governess affair)
the title has been inherited by the only Duke's legitimate son,
Robert, who unlike his father, is good, gentile, altruistic and
lacking of any kind of malice in his blood; is life, since he was a
boy, has been totally devoid of affection from both his parents: his
father, not particularly smart, spendthrift and mean, married
Robert's mother to restore his financial problems but when his
father-in-law refused to keep paying for the Duke's bad behaviours
which only made her daughter miserable, Clermont started to
blackmail her wife, using their own son in exchange for more money.
Unfortunately the extortion made the Duchess cold and detached
towards her son, leaving him at his father's mercy.
Robert grows up in loneliness...until
one day at school he meets the one person who will become the most
important for him: his stepbrother Oliver Marshall, born from his
father's violence towards a governess, Serena (The governess
affair).
