A Lady for a Duke - Halfway Checkpoint
Positives so far:
I’m fond of the main characters, Viola and Gracewood. It’s really relieving to indulge in a story where the characters are fairly established adults (though I don’t think their specific ages are mentioned, in my mind's eye they are both in their 30s) as opposed to teenagers.
Alexis Hall has managed to write a story in which a character expresses grief (roundaboutly) over another’s transition that doesn’t immediately make me hate that character. Because both Hall and Gracewood acknowledge the grief over who Viola used to be, or who Gracewood thought he knew, as being first and foremost reactionary. Gracewood reacts in the moment with betrayal and lashing out because he has been grieving and he is still struggling, and it is acknowledged as being an innately selfish act. His anger is not over Viola’s “nature,” but instead on the fact he feels hurt that she didn’t trust him with something so important, which in turn makes him and their past friendship feel unimportant. And this is something he begins to realize just on the edge of “too late,” relapsing upon the discovery that Viola and Lady Marleigh have left and waking with a poppy scent and a recognition of his self-centeredness. And Viola does not stand proud and defiant in the face of his insults, his cruelty in assuming it was easy for her. She is grieved by it far more than he is, the decision between a solitude born of freedom and a life that is all she has never known and would have killed her, but as many have to do, stands firm, and waits until she is far away to cry.
Negatives so far:
The writing and pacing at times can drag and be clunky.
“Little Bartholomew,” Viola’s nephew, is something of a victim to the curse of writing small children in a story where they are not the focus. He just barely exists, mostly popping into the narrative to question or point things out bluntly to poke holes in how adults complicate matters, and then promptly disappears.
This is largely an issue with my relationship with historical fiction in general: Hall does offer some commentary onto the intricacies of navigating class in Gracewood and Viola’s relationship, wherein they grew up with the same expectations and wealth, Viola abandons these to become Viola and thus trades her identity for a lower social class, and Gracewood wears his generational status like a heavy yoke that constricts and protects him in equal turns. However, the world at large, the effects Gracewood’s two years of grief as well as his father’s implied heavy fist has on the people who live on the land they own, is largely overlooked. We are given one chapter in which Gracewood and Viola see the village, see that it is struggling with both the bad seasons and illness, and Gracewood expresses discomfort and frustration with this and resolves to put measures in place to aid them, primarily to make repairs, freeze rent, and provide a doctor to the sick. It’s there narratively as part of Gracewood’s development, showing that not only has he become well enough to start realizing what he has neglected and make an effort to better it, but also to show the reader how Gracewood differs from his father, who is described at multiple points as a cold man who believed deeply in the hierarchy that separated him not only from the servants of Morgencald, but the people who lived on its land. However, like in many stories of the upper classes with their gowns and courting traditions which fascinate readers, the actual people on the lower end, who are subject to these Dukes and Duchesses’ whims and turbulent lifestyles, exist only as either window dressing or a litmus test over who is a “bad” landlord and a “good” landlord.
