Miracles and contrivances!

Taming the Savage Duke (Victorian Outcasts #1) by Barbara Russell   

⭐️⭐️⭐️

All Madeline Debenham dreamed of and worked towards was being accepted by the Royal Women’s Academy of the Arts. To be able to paint! An eminent painter Mrs Blanchard was willing to look at her work!

All Hector Wentworth (brother to the Duke of Blackburn), wanted was to become a member of the Royal Botanic Society and join a scientific expedition to South America.

When Maddie’s dream is shattered through an injury caused by Hector she’s left weak and hardly able to hold a brush. That’s a tall tale indeed. Plausible in a strangely earnest way.

By this time I was ropable. Maddie’s dream is dead in the water but she bravely deigns to forgive Hector and send him off to follow his dream! What!! Of course he fails to return. Meanwhile tragedy strikes the Wentworth family and a new heir is waiting in the wings.

Many years later on the way back from a trip to the Bahamas, Maddie sights a raft and sounds the alarm 

That’s right, Hector is the rafts occupant!

What are the odds? Well the situation is being revealed from the pen of the author so all bets are off!

However this is a stretch too far for me.

What with Hector being now shunned by society, and Maddie helping to try to reclaim Hector’s rightful place and inheritance, I found it way too contrived.

There’s so much going on I was dizzy.

And let’s not even talk about Maddie’s mother!!

Still, contrivances aside, suspend all cynicism and this is a pleasing read to while away a couple of hours.

An Oliver-Herber ARC via NetGalley.                                              

Many thanks to the author and publisher.