THE TROUBLE WITH TRUE LOVE is book two in the Dear Lady
Truelove series by Laura Lee Guhrke. Two sisters have
taken over the running of the family's business, a
newspaper. It's all that's left from their drunken
father's mismanagement of a publishing group. Irene,
Clara's older sister, started an advice column for the
lovelorn called "Dear Lady Truelove" that brought back
readership and saved the paper. Now Irene is on her
honeymoon, though, and Clara is failing in her duty of
filling in as author now that all of Irene's prewritten
columns have been published.
Cue the stage for Rex Galbraith, heir of the Earl of
Leyland, to come strolling in from the wings. Rex seems to
take Clara's work at the Daily Gazette in stride, a nice
change of pace for a historical. Rex becomes entangled in
Clara's work machinations fortuitously. Pretty soon, while
secretly working together, Rex discovers Clara's charms.
Is she enough to tempt him away from his well-trodden path
of emotional avoidance?
I find Clara to be much more approachable than her sister
Irene was in book one, THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE AND DUKES. Irene
was militantly feminist. She was such a radical suffragist
that I had a hard time warming up to her. Clara is a heroine
who is softer and easier to get along with. Over the course
of the book, Clara definitely comes into her own, gaining
confidence in her capabilities and recognizing that her own
desires are valid on their own. Huzzah!
THE TROUBLE WITH TRUE LOVE avoids something that I think
a lot of historical romances are grappling with right now.
Heroines can't just be a little plucky and slightly
independent. They seem to be becoming much more in-your-face
independent, and it's becoming a more severe
construct. To me, this is often disruptive of the feel of
a historical romance. This was a problem for me in book one
of this series by Guhrke. It must be quite a challenge for
authors to believably incorporate modern sensibilities into
old-fashioned times! It can come across as very jarring,
although the turn of the century period for the Dear Lady
Truelove series does lend itself more to it,
because of the changes in women's attitudes at the time.
Thank goodness for me, Clara is not militantly liberated and
and argumentative like her sister is.
Rex and Clara face believable external and internal
challenges to their romance, and their slow path to love
develops realistically. I appreciate how they manage to
talk through things much of the time (I'm not a fan of the
Big Misunderstanding trope). Guhrke's second in the
series, THE TROUBLE WITH TRUE LOVE is a solidly lovely
historical romance and represents a great improvement in
storyline. I'm curious to see who will be next to fall
victim to Lady Truelove's matchmaking.
Dear Lady Truelove,I am a girl of noble family, but I am painfully shy, especially in my encounters with those of the opposite sex . . . For Clara Deverill, standing in for the real Lady Truelove means dispensing advice on problems she herself has never managed to overcome. There’s nothing for it but to retreat to a tearoom and hope inspiration strikes between scones. It doesn’t—until Clara overhears a rake waxing eloquent on the art of “honorable” jilting. The cad may look like an Adonis, but he’s about to find himself on the wrong side of Lady Truelove. Rex Galbraith is an heir with no plans to produce a spare. He flirts with the minimum number of eligible young ladies to humor his matchmaking aunt, but Clara is the first to ever catch his roving eye. When he realizes that Clara—as Lady Truelove—has used his advice as newspaper fodder, he’s infuriated. But when he’s forced into a secret alliance with her, he realizes he’s got a much bigger problem—because Clara is upending everything Rex thought he knew about women—and about himself. . . .
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