Two Boneheads Fall in Love: One Dance with the Duke

As I wait for the next installment of Tessa Dare's newest series, I've been sifting through her backlist. This time I landed with the first book of her Stud Club series, One Dance with a Duke. The stud club refers to a stallion, of course, and this first book centers on the Duke of Morland, an anti-social brute (aren't they all?) looking to possess the stallion Osiris for his own - for entirely sentimental reasons that he will play very predictably close to the chest.

I suppose that is the point of genre romance, isn't it? To be predictable? With a very small modicum of excitement and newness thrown in? This particular book, will still above the standard of other authors, was very predictable in its trajectory. There were some good, sensual moments between the duke and Amelia, the self-professed curvy girl who loves everyone she meets to a fault, but in this particular case the emotional moments that I favor had a bad taste to them because there were multiple instances of both leads acting badly toward each other. Usually, it's the duke who's being the dunderhead, but in this case, there were times when I wanted to smack both of them upside the head, which meant that the scenes of emotional connection were not as strong as they could have been, and which would have elevated this title. The biggest example is how Amelia's enabling of her brother's gambling habits is written as her deep devotion to him, and when the Spencer (the duke) points out to her that she's doing more harm than good, she is furious, and he is forced to apologize. Really? Sorry. The woman is not always right. That's not very female-forward, and for someone like me who can't really stand stupid people or the stupid decisions they make, it didn't endear me to her at all.

I also didn't appreciate the constant reference to Amelia's size. I'm all for curvy women being praised and desired, in fiction and in real life, but the way in which this was a constant descriptor made it sound like she was obese and that Spencer had a fat fetish. That's all fine, but that's more of a niche read, which is not what I'm looking for and I'm pretty sure that's not what Dare intended. So while trying to be inclusive of all shapes, getting hit on the head with it tends to have the opposite effect, highlighting this as an outlier. Especially when paired with constant references to the fact that Amelia, by her own and Spencer's standards, "is no great beauty." Hmm. Doesn't exactly make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Which is what romance paperbacks are supposed to do!

K Rating: 3/5