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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