Gilly, the meek Duke of Sale, decides to temporarily ditch his nagging household in exchange for a few days of peace as an anonymous Everyman. Instead, he spends his holiday foiling blackmailers, escaping kidnappers, and rescuing two feckless children.

Gilly makes an amazingly sweet protagonist. His adventures are rollicking, and his broadly drawn household provides the signature Heyer humor. The one false note is probably Belinda, the eponymous foundling, who is less a character and more a punchline. On the other hand, nobody reads Georgette Heyer for her multi-dimensional characters.

(As a side note, Gilly has a cousin, Gideon, who is tall, dark, and handsome. Gideon calls Gilly his "little one." Gideon flies into passionate rages when Gilly's life is threatened. Gideon has no apparent female associates. In another author, I think I would suspect a subtext.) ( )

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A diffident young man of 24 years, easily pushed around by his overprotective uncle and the retinue of devoted family retainers who won't let him lift a finger for himself, Adolphus Gillespie Vernon Ware ("Gilly"), the seventh Duke of Sale, sometimes wishes he could be a commoner. One day he decides to set out to discover whether he is "a man, or only a Duke."

Beginning with an incognito journey into the countryside to confront a blackmailer, he encounters a runaway school boy, a beautiful but airheaded orphan, one of literature's most appealing and well-spoken comic villains, and a series of alarming and even life threatening events from which he can extricate himself only with the help of his shy and lovely fiancé… ( )

Very enjoyable coming of age story with some romance thrown in. My last Heyer romance (tear) and I tried to savor it but I just zoomed right through. *sigh* How sad to be through them all now. ( )

I don't really know what to say about this book. The writing is superb; really just near perfect. The dialog is crafted so well it just trips off the tongue, even though it's a speech pattern that's hardly common today.

And I genuinely liked Lord Sale and his cousin Gideon (him best of all, I think); I even didn't mind the pompous uncle and Tom was moderately amusing. I should give Heyer a fourth star just for that story about the two donkeys, a horse and a cow. But as for the rest...

Lord Sale's staff were insufferable. Heyer meant them to be, of course; that's a big point of the plot from the beginning, but she did her job so well it was tedious to endure the reading of it.

Liversedge was probably brilliant and towards the end even I thought the situation was hilarious, but the first half of the book his character was just smarmy.

But the character I save most of my ire for is Belinda. It was coincidence that I was reading this book the same time I was reading Grey Mask by Patricia Wentworth, but it was also perhaps karma having a go at me: I claimed nobody could be as stupid as Margot in Grey Mask and so the fates brought Belinda into my reading life. Belinda makes Margot look like a genius; Belinda makes air look literate. Belinda, in short, should have been institutionalised. Nobody – nobody – could be that vacuous and still show signs of life.

If this book failed at all it was with Heyer's decision to make Belinda too stupid to be believed. I could not be sympathetic to her story at any point because she was not even believable as an automaton. And because she played such a huge part in the middle of the book, the story dragged dangerously midway through and at one point, I just didn't want to finish it. Fortunately, the POV shifted to Gideon, and the story picked up pace considerably. The last half of the book was great, in fact: even though Belinda got to let her stupid shine to the very end, there was a lot less of her and the story focused on the characters that were interesting - the sentient ones.

The moral of this story: stupid people can ruin even the best story. ( )