This is a Regency version of My Fair Lady, and not a very convincing one. It exceeded my expectations, and was more convincing than I had expected considering the preposterousness of the premise, but then again, my expectations were extremely low and my dubiousness not entirely misguided. Come on, people, this is the Regency era. Liaisons between commoners and dukes are highly uncommon, and that of a barmaid and a duke? Even more ludicrous. Still, this book carried it off the dubious premise better than I expected, and I really enjoyed the characters. However, the relationship between the main characters never did ring true to me, and ultimately I didn't find myself completely sold on the premise. 
 The dowager Duchess of Halford is at her wit's end. Her disreputable son refuses to do her duty, and unlike the many previous dowager whatevers in numerous other Regency novels who merely complain about it, she actually does something about her problem. She drugs her son and drags him to Spindle Cove, AKA Spinster Cove, and demands that he select a bride from the multitude of available young women there. He just has to choose a woman, any woman, and the Dowager Duchess will make her a success in society within a week. To spite his mother, Griff, the Duke of Halford chooses the most unsuitable woman in the room. Pauline Simms, a barmaid who has made a grand entrance, cursing, burning with fury, and completely covered in sugar due to a rather unfortunate event right before the Duke's arrival. To Griff, "she was perfect. Coarse, uneducated, utterly graceless...A mud-spattered, sugar-dusted, smart-mouthed serving girl in drab linsey-woolsey." 
 So Griff, that dissolute rake (are there any other kind?), is setting Pauline up for failure before they even start, but this is a Regency romance after all, so let's not delude ourselves as to the outcome. They shockingly fall in love. Blah blah blah. It's all predictable and boring, I didn't buy the story much, and her transformation---the basis for the story, is just not well done at all. Pauline---and I'm not kidding about this---magically begins to pronounce words correctly (nothing instead of nothin'...etc) due to kissing him, due to his limbering of her tongue. I'm speechless. No pun intended. 
 By themselves, the characters were very well-built and sympathetic. I did not like Pauline's character initially, however hard-knock her life was as we first see her. We know that she has been abused at home and pitied in town, but in the beginning, her character is so annoying. She is deliberately provocative, she acts like someone from the gutter, like the foul-mouth barmaid she is supposed to be instead of the strong, educated young woman of poor background as she actually is. I know that Pauline is having fun at the dowager's expense, but it didn't endear me to her in the least. Here is this surprisingly open-minded dowager duchess, and she is a likeable one, accepting of a barmaid as her future daughter in law, trying to instruct her so she doesn't disgrace herself in town and all Pauline does is deliberately try to aggravate her. For the first 1/3 of the book, I would have been happy for that foul-mouthed, graceless fishwife Pauline to be sent back to Spindle Cove and have the book end right there inconclusively. She is determined to be difficult and defiant so it took me a long time to warm up to her. 
 "'So your grace never curses.' 
 'I do not.' 
 'Words like cor...bollocks...damn...devil...blast...bloody hell..." She pronounced the words with relish, warming to her task. "They don't cross a duchess's lips?" 
 I feel like a bit of an asshole disparaging her character, because she did have it pretty hard growing up. Her father is widely looked upon with pity in the village due to the fact that he only had two daughters, Pauline and Daniela, and Daniela is mentally challenged. He abuses her, physically and mentally, belittles her, and destroys her hopes and dreams. When she has aspirations to a better life, when she reads a book that gives her hope, her father takes the book and beats her with it. 
 Pauline has had to be strong, she hangs on to her hopes of building a book shop despite everything, and she's had to defend her sister against all the hate and pitying glares and cruel comments that others have made. Pauline accepts Griff's offer against her will because he offers her a thousand pound if she is successful at thwarting his mother, and even at the cost of her pride, she needs it to get a better life for herself and her sister. I do love her character. 
 "'There's always a pecking order. The big will torment the small, and the small will torment the smaller, and on down the line. It's the nature of chicks, and it's the nature of children, too. Don't dream it will change...Just keep your head up and get what's yours. Your food, your schooling. Whatever they give you, don't squander it. All bread goes straight in your belly, and all the learning you can gather goes here.' She tapped a fingertip against her temple. 'Stash it away. Because once it's in you, it's yours. No one can take it from you." 
 Griff is your typical Regency duke. Wealthy, successful, but resolutely dissolute and adamantly against settling down. He is a likeable character, not altogether depraved as reputation would have it, and what we see of him initially is a man who's unwilling to get married. There are hints of something in his past, and we do get some glimpses of a shadowy grief; I will not spoil it, but it turned out to be unexpected and believable, and I completely commisserate with his sorrow when we finally found out what it was. He is completely truthful with Pauline from the start, about his character and his expectations of her, he's not promising her the moon nor a fairy tale, just a week's worth of paid companionship to dissuade his mother from her single-minded mission. Griff does make some nice speeches about Pauline too, proclaiming his hardened-heart, and they're rather convincing: 
 "'You don't want to hear that you're their equal. You want to hear that you're their better...I'm supposed to deem your little water-goblet tune more enchanting than any Italian aria. Proclaim your wholesome country manners a breath of fresh air in my sin-clouded life.' He laughed. 'What else? Perhaps you're hoping to hear that your purity is the most intoxicating and rare of perfumes. Your hair smells like hedgerows and your eyes are like chips of wide-open sky, and God above, you make me feel things. Things I haven't felt in years. Or ever.' With his free hand, he clutched his chest dramatically. 'What is this strange stirring in my breast? Could it possibly be...love?'" 
 Those big words would be a lot more convincing if he weren't already inexplicably heads over heels in love at that point and merely talking big for his ego's sake. I really found their attraction and growing relationship unconvincing. Their banter is funny, the book is hilarious at times, but I never felt like their relationship is a plausible one. One character I unexpectedly loved was the dowager duchess. She is your typical steel-tough dowager, but she has her soft spot, and an unexpected problem with knitting: "Is it a cap for a two-headed snake? A mitten for a three-fingered arthritic? Even I don't know, and I made the thing." 
 The characters and the writing are the best things about this book, because I found the plot not terribly well-done and her transformation from serving girl to society girl was barely brushed upon. She is given a boatload of books to read, given clothes, but other than that, Pauline seems already capable. Her status as a barmaid is rather misleading because instead of than an uneducated barmaid whose transformation would be realistic and considerably more difficult, we are given Pauline who is already educated and cultured, in fact, rather too educated to be believable country girl of poor stock. Overall, this was a good book, but read it for the characters and the hilarity of the banter, not the thinly contrived tale.