Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

Dear Ms. Dahl:

Had you not sent Dear Author the ARC of this book for review, the cheesy cover, hackneyed title, and curious cover quote from Eloisa James - “So hot the pages smoke . . . ” - would have thoroughly deterred me from picking it up on my own. Which would have been a shame, as A Rake’s Guide to Pleasure is a much better book than all of those superficial markers suggest.

Both Emma Jensen and the Duke of Somerhart are in disguise, she as a widow of body, and he as a widower of heart, two incredibly lonely people who are grieving for more losses than they can even let on to themselves. The duke, Hart (or Winterhart, as he is now casually known), has never fully recovered from an early emotional loss, a true fall into love that ended disastrously and with incredible public humiliation. Emma has lost the entirety of her family, including a thoroughly reprobate father and an uncle whom she loved and who provided what little security and happiness she had after her mother’s early death. Left with a very small inheritance, Emma remains …

I am having a horrible time writing this review. There’s nothing I can criticize about this book. Not one single thing. How can you write a balanced review when there’s nothing weak or flawed there to balance all the good? So I’m giving up—this is not a balanced review, I’m going to gush and praise like the most rabid of fangirls.

The back cover blurb doesn’t even begin to convey the complexity of the story, nor the mastery of the writing:

Elly
In town, they called her “Crazy Widow Dinsmore.” But Elly was no stranger to their ridicule—she had been an outsider all her life, growing up in a boarded-up old house under the strict eye of her eccentric grandparents. Now she was all alone, with two little boys to raise, and a third child on the way.

Will
He drifted into Whitney, Georgia, one lazy afternoon in the summer of 1941, hoping to put his lonely past behind him. He yearned for the tenderness he had never known, the home he’d never had. All he needed was for someone to give him a chance.

Then he saw a classified ad: WANTED—A husband. When he stepped across Elly Dinsmore’s …