** spoiler alert ** 
 I love Eloisa James but this book was an odd duck (ha!). It splits into two very different halves with two very different protagonists. Theo/Daisy in the first half is an "ugly duckling" who marries her best friend James then discovers he manipulated her into it. She throws him out and they endure an 8-year separation. Not a surprising set up, though rather extreme in years. What sets this apart, at first, is the deep friendship between Theo and James, and her "ugliness," though Eloisa (too confusing to call her James when that's the hero's name) has trouble negotiating that. Theo is "ugly" and looks like a boy to the public, but her friends and James find her attractive. So then there should be a second half for her transformation, right? The swan part? But she doesn't quite transform either -- she becomes elegant but in a sort of "jolie laide" way ("ugly-pretty," the French have a term for every variation of beauty) and her new confidence is only skin deep. She does transform, oddly enough, in personality because she becomes a very prim Type A type (why?). And James! He becomes a pirate (why?) So their reunion is odd (the word stays relevant) because it undermines the very thing they had going for them from the start, which was that deep knowledge of each other. Now, they are like two new, different people and Eloisa has to kind of rush through a second narrative to get to her HEA. Weird. Not the best of her work, but okay.