Duchess by Design

September 3, 2018
Rodale (It’s Hard Out Here for a Duke) charms with this captivating historical, the story of an impoverished English duke who sets out to marry an American “dollar princess” and a genteel dressmaker who prizes her independence above all. The Duke of Kingston would prefer to marry for love, but he’s got dowries to fund and a mother whose fashion spending rivals a small country’s GDP. He hopes for both love and money when he meets Adeline Black, whom he erroneously believes to be heiress Harriet Burnett, in the lobby of New York’s most fashionable hotel. Once his misapprehension is corrected, Kingston cuts a swath through Manhattan’s most eligible—but he can’t forget Adeline. After a group of subversive suffragettes sets up Adeline with her own shop, she believes she has it all—but Kingston reminds her that she doesn’t have love. Sparkling characters, able plotting, and joie de vivre make the first in Rodale’s Gilded Age Girls Club an utterly enjoyable standout.

September 1, 2018
The Duke of Kingston has crossed the pond to wed a wealthy heiress, a quest complicated when he meets a talented, ambitious seamstress he mistakes for a potential wife.On the way to a fitting with an heiress at a Fifth Avenue hotel, seamstress Adeline Black literally runs into the Duke of Kingston in the lobby. The duke has come to America to find a rich wife and immediately been deemed the most eligible bachelor in New York. Adeline reads the papers and realizes that the handsome Englishman is the celebrated duke, and while they shared an instant attraction and a brief flirtation, he is completely out of her league. Kingston, meanwhile, misinterprets the fact that she's in the hotel to mean she's from the upper class. When he pursues her, he inadvertently gets her fired, which is at first devastating but ultimately leads her back to the heiress client who, along with a group of forward-thinking society women, backs her in establishing her own dressmaker's shop, rewarding Adeline's talent, vision, and courage to express her dreams. Her designs quickly become the talk of the town, as does the duke's interest, though they both know he must marry wealth. The relationship remains platonic but still tarnishes her reputation, since society considers her a threat and her former employer is resentful of her success. Just as Kingston resolves to marry the woman he loves, thanks in huge part to Adeline's penchant for challenging his worldview, Adeline's integrity and devotion to the women who now work for her may jeopardize their chance for happiness. In the end, Adeline's originally weary reproach of "Change the world, Duke" becomes both an aspiration and a rallying cry for the remarkable couple.Rodale's Gilded Age-set series launch is a smart, bright love story that perfectly balances messages of female empowerment and social potential with romantic tensions created by class and gender dichotomies ripe for revolution.

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Starred review from October 15, 2018
Adeline Black has a passion for fashion that is not being fulfilled working as a seamstress for Madame Chalfont, and fully believes that her upcoming fitting session with Miss Harriet Burnett will finally provide her with the opportunity to showcase her sartorial skills to the world at large. But Adeline's couture career plan hits an unexpected snag when she bumps into Brandon Alexander Fiennes, Duke of Kingston, whose search for an heiress to wed has brought him to New York City. Agreeing to show Kingston around and steer him toward suitably wealthy and matrimonially minded ladies while she's dressed in her own designs would certainly provide Adeline with plenty of free advertising, but can she trust Kingston when he says he can't afford to fall in love with her? With an almost Wodehousian flair for words, perfectly placed wit, endlessly amusing characters, and a vividly evoked 1890s New York City setting, Rodale launches her new Gilded Age Girls Club series on a spectacularly high note.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)