Common Thread

Over the past year, I’ve been delving more into Regency romance and have found it’s one of my favorite genres. It has the lightheartedness of the romance genre, but reminds me of my beloved Jane Austen novels and the Bridgerton television series (based on Julia Quinn’s own Regency romance series).

So I jumped at the chance to participate in the Book Tour for Jane Dunn’s An Unsuitable Heiress, a Regency romance with a creative premise. The heroine, Corinna, is living with a cousin who wants to marry her off to an unappealing older man after the death of her mother years before. She knows that she is the illegitimate daughter of a man in London, so she hatches a plot to head there to find him while dressed as a man. Her male disguise allows her safety and freedom of movement, but it also gives her the opportunity to fall into a friendship with three dashing young men of the Ton.

Things spiral from there, with Corinna searching for her father, trying to successfully pose as a man, and fighting her confusing pull to her new friend, the handsome Alick Wolfe. I really appreciated that this story not only has romance and adventure, but also found family and two really lovely female friendships. Plus, as a dog mom myself, I loved Corinna’s dedication to her poodle, Piro!

I found Corinna to be very easy to love and root for. While she is definitely a flawed main character, her motivations are very easy to follow. Perhaps she forgives her father for his earlier abandonment a bit too easily, but it’s understandable given how grateful she is for her change in circumstances. I appreciated that she’s as driven by her close friendships as she is by her love life.

The extensive array of side characters is all great as well, from the dandyish Ferdy to the brooding Rav to all of the servants who populate the great houses our characters live in. I thought that Alick’s brother Darius, newly the heir to a title and fortune, was a formidable antagonist for our heroine as she’s struggling to understand both him and the new world in which she’s found herself.

You can tell that author Dunn is a historian and put lots of work into researching all the historical details, which — as a historian myself — I loved to see! It made me very interested in checking out some of her earlier non-fiction works. She expertly weaved Regency slang and concepts through the book and while there were sometimes unfamiliar terms, I was always able to figure out what they meant from context.

I would love to see this book spawn spin-offs to explore the fates of some of the side characters whose endings are less well defined. Hopefully, Dunn continues writing Regency romance because this is one of my favorite that I’ve read. If you’re a fan of Regency romance and want something unpredictable, with lots of twists and turns, then An Unsuitable Heiress is certainly the book for you.

I was given an ARC of this book by Net Galley, Jane Dunn, Boldwood Books, and Austenprose PR in exchange for an honest review. You can purchase a copy of the book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. You can also download it on Kindle Unlimited.