Review: Forgotten & Remembered: The Duke's Late Wife (Love's Second Chance #1) by Bree Wolf

                                                      

Print Length: 309 pages

Publisher: Bree Wolf (November 22, 2015)

From Goodreads.com: A grieving widower. A strong lady. And a little girl who needs them both.

After losing his wife in an accident, GRAHAM ASTOR, DUKE OF KENSINGTON, decides that love is not worth the risk of having his heart broken all over again. Even his little daughter he keeps at a distance, afraid to hurt her with the darkness that now lives in his heart. Since he is unable to be the father she deserves, he vows to find her a mother who will heal her little heart.

At a garden party, Graham spots a young woman with a shy smile tending lovingly to her little cousins…and he knows his duty.

As the black sheep of her family, ROSABEL LANDER has no illusions about love. After her parents’ deaths, her aunt and uncle reluctantly took her in, demanding nothing short of complete obedience. Unable to live down her past, Rosabel only wishes for one thing: freedom.

However, before she dares to take the first step toward an independent future, a cold-hearted stranger asks for her hand in marriage…and as the obedient niece, Rosabel cannot refuse.

Will Rosabel find love after all? Or will the memory of Graham's late wife keep them both from finding happiness?

  

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My Rating: 1 star out of 5

I first read this book in 2019, and I hated it. However, I recently found it sitting on my Kindle while I was bored and thought, why not? It’s been seven years, my tastes have surely changed, and maybe I’d see something in it this time around that I didn’t see the first time. Sadly, I think I hated it even more the second time around.

These characters were so unbelievably tedious (and predictable) that reading this novel felt more like a chore than an escape from reality. And considering I voluntarily picked it up a second time, I suppose that one’s on me.

First, we have Rosabel. A young woman who lost both of her parents and was raised by an aunt and uncle who already had enough children of their own that they were largely disinterested in her. If they weren't ignoring her, they were finding some offense in something she said or did. As a result, Rosabel learned to be a doormat because apparently keeping everyone else happy was easier than standing up for herself.

Enter Graham, a Duke whose wife has died, leaving him with a young daughter who desperately needs a mother. Especially since Graham has A LOT of issues and seems to spend very little time in the same house as his child. Graham is easily one of the most insufferable characters I've ever had the misfortune of encountering. He sees Rosabel interacting with her young cousins twice and decides that she'll suit his needs perfectly. So what does he do? He goes to her uncle and asks permission to marry her. Without ever speaking to her. Yup. You read that right. These two get married without having exchanged a single word with one another until their wedding day. Romantic, right? But that’s okay, because Graham doesn’t intend on spending any time with his new wife either, immediately packing her off to his ancestral estate where his elderly grandmother and his child reside.

Of course, Helen, the Duke's grandmother, and Georgiana, his daughter, waste no time making Rosabel feel welcome. They were easily two of the only characters I could tolerate, aside from Rosabel's cousin Ellie. Even Graham's best friend and former brother-in-law, Edmond, rubbed me the wrong way because he seemed to constantly be flirting with Rosabel whenever he came to visit. Unfortunately for Graham, the governess he's hired for his daughter is an absolute witch. And while Graham is off doing whatever it is Graham does, Rosabel eventually finds her spine and starts standing up to people.

Not for herself, of course. For Georgiana. Rosabel comes to love this child as her own daughter and begins making decisions based on what she believes is best for her. Which, honestly, is exactly what she should be doing. While Graham is busy running away from his problems, Rosabel has the good sense to actually parent his child. She even has the portrait of Georgiana's late mother, Lenora, brought down from the attic and hung in the nursery after Georgiana asks for it. She also discovers Lenora's diaries and letters that were presumably written to her by Graham, making it painfully obvious to pretty much everyone that this man is still very much in love with his late wife.

And this could have been where we got a really good story. There was so much potential here. We could have had some actual push and pull between Rosabel and Graham as they tried to figure out what kind of marriage they were going to have. We could have watched them slowly get to know one another while simultaneously figuring out what was best for Georgiana.

Instead? We got a giant disaster of Graham acting like a spoiled, overgrown manchild for forty-some-odd chapters. Seriously. For 99.9% of this book, Graham does one of three things:

1. Runs away from his wife and child. Especially if something happens that causes him to start seeing Rosabel in a positive light. Heaven forbid this man actually stick around and deal with his feelings like an adult.

2. Wallow in self-pity and take it out on his wife and child. Because apparently everyone else needs to suffer whenever Graham is unhappy.

3. Become furious with Rosabel for doing what is best for his child. This one really got me. At one point, he screams at Rosabel because she had Lenora's portrait hung in Georgiana's nursery, even though Georgiana specifically asked for it. He tells her the portrait will be removed and destroyed and that Rosabel is never to speak of his late wife again. He also repeatedly throws it in her face that she is supposed to “obey” him because he's her husband. This man is supposedly a Duke, but he spends most of the book behaving like a spoiled toddler who has been told he can't have his way.

And let's not forget that he threatens to separate Rosabel and Georgiana simply because HE'S unhappy. I swear, one minute Graham is perfectly content around them and the next he's doing everything in his power to make them miserable. He'll make a tiny bit of progress, realize he's actually enjoying being around his wife and daughter, and then, because apparently personal growth is terrifying, he'll run away in the middle of the night.

Again. And again. And again. On and on it goes until we're forty-some chapters into a book that desperately needed a good editor with a pair of scissors.

And then of course, eventually, and I do mean end of the book eventually, these two are supposed to fall in love. Except I didn't buy it. Not even a little. There was NOTHING in these pages that convinced me these two were developing feelings for one another. We are simply expected to believe that Rosabel somehow fell in love with Graham while he was avoiding her, threatening her, and trying to send both her and Georgiana away, even though his daughter was absolutely distraught at the thought.

And Graham? Apparently all this man needed to fall in love was for Rosabel to tell him she was proud of him. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to need a little more than that. Because when your romantic development consists primarily of one person running away and the other person trying to clean up the emotional wreckage he leaves behind, I'm sorry, but I'm not seeing the great love story here.

And as a sidenote, if I had to read about Rosabel's “knees turned to pudding” one more time, my Kindle was in serious danger of becoming airborne.

Needless to say, I will be deleting this book from my Kindle. Which, obviously, is something I should have done the first time I read it.