Too Wilde to Wed by Eloisa James

June 20, 2018
Sometimes things don't work if they don't make sense. 

http://www.eloisajames.com/
Well this is the second book in Eloisa James series about the Wilde family, and so far I’ve been disappointed. This is not up to par with a lot of Ms. James stories. I’m not sure if this one was rushed or if Ms. James was having trouble connecting the dots, but for me this story had a bit of a disjointed fill to it.

Ms. James is ending this particular series with “sort of” cliffhangers. Oh, don’t worry my little Petunias, she finishes the main story. It’s just that she tacks on a cliffhanger. So, in the last one the secondary character of North, aka Lord Roland, aka Lord Roland Northbridge, aka heir to a Dukedom, has been dumped by his fiancée Diane Belgrave. Well, in the end of that book we see North finding Diane hidden away at a cottage with a baby in her arms. 

This book picks up two years later and North is returning to England after two years fighting in the American Revolutionary War. Imagine his surprise when upon his arrival he finds Diane ensconced at his brother’s house as a governess to his half-sister Artemesia. Artemesia also happens to be one of those children who talks as if they are thirteen when in all actuality they are two years old. But the really big surprise is that Diane’s bastard child is also living with North’ family. But wait, there’s more!! Everyone thinks that the little boy, Godfrey, is North’s child. My mind did stumble a bit at this point. When we left the first story, I thought the baby in Diane’s arms was a leddle baby, brand new. But according to this book, he’s four. Wouldn’t North’s family know he wasn’t the father? Wouldn’t his friend’s know? Wouldn’t everyone in society know that Diane wasn’t evvvveeeer pregnant? Most women get a large protrusion.  Wouldn’t North know? Anyway, this part of the story didn’t make all that much sense to me – and that was just the beginning of a lot of things that didn’t blend together logically. 

Well North takes the whole society-you-got-a-kid thing rather well. He’s not really upset, just puzzled. He’s not really upset that Diane is living in his father’s house, just puzzled. He’s sort of a low-key kind of guy. Anyway, it isn’t long before North and Diane are communicating with each other. It isn’t long before they discover that they didn’t really know each other when they were engaged. They were both pretending to be other people – not “other people, other people”, but different personas. He was trying to be what everyone thought a future Duke should be and she was trying to be what she was told a Duchess should be. They were both pretending, and they were both very uncomfortable with the roles they were trying to take on. In the first part of the book we get to see them as they relearn each other and that was the nice part of the book. This part of the story was alllll about getting to know one another. Then Ms. James decided to throw some tension into the mix. The second part of the book was taken up mostly by a two year-old spouting wisdom, North proposing again and again and again and Diane turning him down again and again – at least when it came to becoming married. She didn’t have too much of a problem jumping into the sack with someone she wasn’t married to. Remember this is Georgian times, not the 21st century.

Here's the tension part. Diana has an aversion to being a Duchess. She has some idea she would not be qualified for it. She moans on and on about it. She doesn’t quite get the fact that if she was a Duchess, she could probably write her own rules. After numerous turn down of the North proposals she decides to strike out on her own. She has an idea, and it’s a doozy. She decides to take off and become a barmaid. Yes, you heard right. A barmaid. I admit, I had to lay the book down for that one. Nothing better than being a barmaid in Georgian England. I bet that would bring in some coin to help raise poor four year-old Godfrey. I was astounded that this was in the book, it was just so, I don’t know – silly. A barmaid. Yep, I want to work in a smelly, dangerous tavern in Georgian England because I am not fit to be a Duchess. 

But North saved her and they married and they went off to sunny Italy to not be a Duke or Duchess. I wasn’t really quite sure what was going on with the ending. 

To say that I’m disappointed in Too Wilde to Wed is an understatement. I admire Eloisa James; I love most of her books, but I’m not quite sure what the point of this one was. While it started out with a good idea, which might have been fun or romantic, it dissolved into odd pieces of things thrown together. There were things that didn’t make sense and a heroine who was just too juvenile for words. I can only hope the next Wilde book is better, or I might have to take a break from this series. 

Time/Place: Georgian England
Sensuality: Warm/Hot