Heather Mar-Gerrison, $0.99, ISBN 978-1476011912
Historical Romance, 2021

Heather Mar-Gerrison’s The Real Duke of Circhester was first published in 2012, but the edition I read had been revised in 2021.

This is part of a series revolving around siblings that buckle under the tyranny of their father, the Duke of Circhester. The duke isn’t a cruel man, just someone that can be very rigid about his views of how things should be, and he can go to extremes to make sure things stay that way.

For example, his oldest son and the hero of this story, Ephraim Brunswick, stutters, so when the boy was five, the duke had him declared dead so that the Earl of Brunswick title will go to the second son, Philip that doesn’t have a similar problem. That way, the next Duke of Circhester will be able to speak without coming off like a Barbara Cartland heroine in boy drag.

Ephraim lives, however, and at 18, his hormones finally kick in and he fancies a lovely lady that he wonders aloud whether is even real. I wonder at that, as well, as the heroine’s name—Eliza—is only revealed about one-third into the story. Can a stutterer find love with a woman whom he feels deserves better because he is a “mute without a title”?

Wait, is stuttering and being mute the same thing? I’m confused.

Then again, this story confuses me.

First off, it is marketed to me as a romance, but the focus is more on the Brunswicks’ family drama. The romance itself resides in that area where the boundary between childish-wholesome and creepy can be hard to distinguish. Ephraim and Eliza think and act like the main characters in a Disney cartoon from the 1990s, gamboling around in childish innocence despite professing their attraction to one another, and then things can get unintentionally creepy when Ephraim talks about how much he loves her scent after he’s encountered Eliza for the first time.

Then, I’m also confused by what the author is trying to do here. The siblings’ stories (including their own romances) and back stories also play out here, which makes me wonder then what the author is going to stuff the stories headlined by those siblings with. Furthermore, these side stories take up precious space that could have been devoted to making the romance between Ephraim and Eliza more real and less of a Disney cartoon.

The most confusing aspect of this story, however, is how Ephraim’s stutter, which drives his father to declare him dead, evaporates after the first few chapters. Sure, the author occasionally remembers to do that s-s-s-s-tut-t-t-tering thing for our hero’s dialogues, but for the most part, he converses easily and effortlessly.

What happened? Is the cure for stuttering as simple as wanting to horny-horn someone? Given how the hero’s stuttering is supposed to be so bad at the beginning, I don’t know what to make of the hero’s overnight improvement of his conversational abilities.

Anyway, I don’t know what to make of this thing. While it’s nowhere as bad as to be utterly painful to read, it’s also leaves me scratching my head and wondering what the author is aiming for with this story.

I’m not even sure what story is the author focusing on, to be honest, as despite the back cover synopsis hyping up Ephraim’s story, that romance seems to take a backseat after a while for the author to focus on the other two siblings. The last part is especially perplexing, because why not just keep those bits about the other siblings to their own stories?

At the end of the day, I have no idea what the real deal is with The Real Duke of Circhester!