Mills & Boon, £4.99, ISBN 978-0-263-92572-2
Historical Romance, 2017

Liz Tyner’s The Wallflower Duchess has some interesting elements that are rarely seen in a historical romance set in 19th century England: what happens to a marriage of two people from different strata of society after the honeymoon.

Our heroine Lily Hightower’s mother is of the upper working class sort, while her father is the usual blue-blooded toff. They were besotted at first, but her mother could never fit in among the Ton. This woman tried going back to her friends and people that she knew before her marriage, but she could no longer fit in either due to the fact that she was now above them in station. Meanwhile, Lily’s grandparents never accepted her mother either, and soon the couple lived separate lives.

So now, the present. She asks her childhood friend and neighbor Lionel, the Duke of Edgeworth, to marry her sister because this sister, Abigail, has expressed a desire to have a husband. I’m not sure what Edgeworth will get out of this, but what can I say? It’s romance heroine logic in action.

Edgeworth, or Edge as he is called here because I supposed a shorter nickname means a longer pee-pee, will rather marry Lily, but he doesn’t tell her this until later. So Lily keeps hovering over him, demanding to know why he hasn’t sealed the deal with her sister, while his cousin sniffs around Abigail and she demands that Edge get the man out of the picture STAT.

The whole thing may seem like some farcical comedy, but alas, the whole thing plays out as a very serious drama, which makes Edge appear like some tease playing hard to get and Lily a nagging twit.

Lily’s parents being what they are means that Lily has a lot of issues. Now, I can empathize with the heroine here because it’s never easy to grow up in a home that had mom and dad screaming and fighting with one another all the time, until eventually the parents separated. It sure left scars on her psyche, and I can sympathize with her.

However, the author barely develops the back story of Lily’s parents, so in many ways, their past story feels like an inconsistent, sometimes contradicting recollections of an unreliable narrator. Still, that wouldn’t be so bad if the author hadn’t let Lily treat her mother as the villain in the story of her life.

That’s one big issue with this story: the author tacks on a complex family history on Lily, only to treat the whole thing like some black and white scenario in which, as usual, the mother gets all the blame because daughters hate their mother or something like that. I’m not kidding, as late in the story, Lily reunites with her mother, but instead of trying to have some heart to heart talk, she treats her mother pretty awfully.

To add insult to the injury, Lily at that point has no leg to stand on. She’s a full blown hypocrite by then. She has a hot button when it comes to women that dare to put out to men before marriage as well as women that are unfaithful—it’s telling that she doesn’t judge the men in such situations in a similar harsh light—but she has no issues having sex with Edge anyway before he puts a ring on her finger. Oh, and he has a mistress, but who cares? Hos don’t count, I suppose, so Edge is still single and he’s not “cheating” on his mistress with her.

Oh, and Lily refuses to marry Edge because she thinks she is unworthy to be his wife, due some half-baked assumptions about her parentage that could have been resolved much earlier if she had been capable of conversing with her mother without being a ball of hypocritical cringe. This goes on for so long that, when she finally gets what she wants and he ditches her, I have a great laugh when she completely breaks apart.

Sadly, other characters quickly work to help guide Edge’s pee-pee back into her so my joy is short-lived.

That’s my other issue with this story: the heroine doesn’t really do anything on her own to earn her happy ending. All the other characters have to push her to get her act together, while she does her best to sabotage their efforts.

As for the hero, he is a guy that I have come across many times in the genre, so he’s nothing remarkable. However, he’s very pushy when it comes to getting the heroine to put out to him that he often comes off as a creep. Also, when he dumps her, it happens out of the blue to the point that the whole thing feels like an ass pull to pad up the story with some last minute drama.

Shame really, the way the story turns out, because there is some promising stuff here. The main characters’ flashback scenes to their younger days are pretty sweet, sometimes heartbreaking when I learn more about their childhood over the course of the story. Also, these characters are interesting, not at all stereotypical sorts, especially the young Edge that was a studious lad interested in numbers. Whose bright idea is it, anyway, to turn the adult Edge into a cookie-cutter nobleman hero?

It’s odd how the two characters seem to have a credible bond of friendship when they were kids, but as adults, they have zero chemistry. This could be due to Lily being a morose git, I suppose, but I also believe it’s due to how these adults behave in a circular, repetitive manner. The kiddie scenes are nice, but the adults bleat and do the same things over and over for long stretches of pages.

Oh, and after all that angst about mom and dad having so many issues after the honeymoon due to societal expectations and prejudices, naturally Lily will never face the same issues after marrying Edge because of… the power of true love, I guess? All of the heroine’s inner demons flee the belfry in her head after she’s finally called her mother all kinds of names, and now the Ton is going be 100% egalitarian and all because finally, the heroine has won and she is more beloved than her harlot mommy.

The author sets up the rules herself, mind you, and she then decides to shove the rules aside for the heroine because mothers are bad so when mothers are vanquished, the rules no longer apply.

Ugh. I get people having parent issues, but come on, surely there is a less insulting way to let these characters exorcise theirs while at the same time keeping the story within realms of plausibility?