“Your mother’s daughter”:  Is there anything Lady Juliana Fiore fears being more? Her mother, who had abandoned her sons and her title, who courted scandal, then vanished from her children’s’ lives?  In the midst of her own semi-disastrous Season, what will happen when her mother reemerges and scandal erupts once more? Those are some of the questions the lady must answer in Sarah MacLean’s Eleven Scandals to Start to Win a Duke’s Heart. On top of that, her brother is a recently-reformed, now-married rake, she has no title of her own, and she can’t seem to stay out of trouble.  Juliana also has a problem with her brain to mouth filter (particularly in Italian), she’s impulsive and passionate and… everything English misses aren’t.  She’s not exactly the most eligible lady of the season: In fact she’s a prime target for the gossips of the Ton.

“The Duke of Disdain”, Simon, Lord Leighton, is a man of stalwart reputation and unimpeachable morals, betrothed to a similarly unblemished society lady, who’s constantly turning down his nose at Juliana and her antics. Her reckless behavior and his sense of propriety clash at every occasion. Of course, this being a romance novel and all, the Duke is hiding some fairly scandalous family secrets of his own, and Lady Juliana – despite her penchant for winding up in all sorts of scandalous scenarios – might be just be longing for a little respectability and ‘normal’ in her life.

I enjoy Sarah MacLean’s books – this book is third in the Love by Numbers series, by the way. There’s some catching up with previous characters, which I always appreciate; but the star of this book was really Juliana and her fish out of water acclimation to the Ton. I find it annoying when the thing that attracts the hero in the first place – say a heroine’s feisty nature – is somehow subsumed by the end of the story ~ how it gets toned down, tweaked, until it’s not really the same kind of person at all, come the end. I was glad to see that didn’t happen here – all the little traits that made Juliana unique – her conjugating verbs in Latin when she was nervous, or reverting to Italian when overloaded, or saying the thing nobody else would dare to say because it needed to be said – were still firmly on display come the conclusion.

I’m not a huge fan of the Do it For Duty Trope, which played a very large role in this story, but I thought it was well done – I could at least understand the majority of Leighton’s hang-ups about his responsibility as the duke, even if I don’t agree or appreciate them. I thought the idea of foreigner = passionate – at least in relation to the supposedly cold, English ways – was a little bit overdone, but that’s probably just because I’ve seen a few too many plays on that type of thing lately (where, in place of foreign, you could substitute ‘red headed’ or, in a particularly memorable occasion ‘Southerner’ (vs. Yankee)). I think I’m just played out on the whole idea that ‘large groups of people are significantly more passionate than other large groups of people,’ right now. But, other than that, I did enjoy this one.