My Last Duchess by Daisy Goodwin Headline Publishing HK$169
With all the hallmarks of a romantic saga peppered with intriguing historical detail from the late 1890s, Daisy Goodwin's first novel has best-seller written all over it.
Cora Cash is 18 and the 'richest girl in America'. She has just enjoyed (or endured?) her coming-out party in Newport, an evening organised by her title-hunting mother and attended by 800 awed guests. Cora has a doomed love interest in Teddy Van Der Leyden, who is - as it turns out later - one of only two likeable characters in the novel.
Sadly for Cora, she is bound by her mother to travel to Britain where Cora literally falls into the hands of the ninth duke of Wareham, a dark and somewhat troubled aristocrat in dire need of funds. A bit of a recluse, he has a friend in the beautiful Charlotte Beauchamp (who is Cora's love rival, unbeknown to the innocent Cora).
It all sounds like a fun, bodice-ripping, holiday-friendly yarn - except for a few problems. Goodwin often falls into Mills & Boone-style descriptions that make it cliched and dull for anyone over 25. ('Cora smelt the musky scent of his neck and ran her fingers through his springy curls. She felt the length of his body pressing against her through her clothes.')
Furthermore, fascinating details of the times - such as a party where guests 'dig' for real jewels in a man-made waterway, the portly Prince of Wales' nickname of Tum Tum and the fact that wealthy American girls were sent to Britain to hunt for a title via an intermediary (who was paid to introduce them to polite society) can't save the simplistic exchanges between most of the characters and the lack of original descriptive prose.