Jess's Reviews > Claiming the Duchess

I've seen TV ads that were longer than this book. I've also never read Sherry Thomas before and this a bad place to start. It's not good, but it could hardly have been better for all its four bloody chapters.

An unhappily married woman named Clarissa who's associated with flowers (sound familiar?) sees Mr Kingston once and is struck with the dart; the next day she gets a letter from a random woman and they strike up a friendship. Then her husband dies and a couple of years later she has a party where she invites both her pen pal and Mr Kingston. We all know where this is going.

Or do we? I'm going to throw a spanner the size of a conspiracy theory into the works. There is a big deal made of the fact that the hero's initials are JMK. They're such a unique group of letters… and hey, I'm pretty sure economist John Maynard Keynes was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Flower-clipping (buying) Clarissa and JMK? Instantly the idea of a Clarissa Dalloway (or if you stretch the boundaries even further, Virginia Woolf) x John Maynard Keynes fanfiction springs to mind. To add flames to the fires of association, Woolf was born in 1882, the starting date in this book. I am undoubtedly onto something.

The romance isn't believable because they just declare their love for each other without showing it in action; no dazzling conversation, no indication that they would suit life together. We don't even get a sex scene, which begs the question: is this really a romance?