Turns out this is book is my histrom Holy Grail. 

I don’t even know what do to, now that I’ve read it. Retire from booksta? That’s it, book search over?

What an epic love story! So amazingly and unflinchingly written, and exactly what I want in a romance: a couple who would never be together in a million years, falling in love anyways. In the angstiest way possible. Also, messy characterization that really goes there. Also, that worldbuilding. Also, an immediate, almost stream of consciousness writing style.

Uh oh, I feel a list coming on..
✨ The culture clash! A heroine who was the Quakeriest Quaker that ever Quakered with a duke. And not the “Cool Mom” version of a duke we always get in a histrom—the Yikes version of a sickeningly entitled rakehell duke.
✨ Love how none of these characters’ edges were softened. They all ground against each other in the most entertaining way imaginable—the puritanical Quaker, the egotistical rake, the unscrupulous friends, the overly scrupulous Friends, and the Lady Catherine de Bourg-esque relatives. 
✨The language!!
✨When a (for real) rake becomes absolutely torn up with love for his wife and I’m annihilated by the juicy angst 😭
✨ The themes and motifs! I wish I’d written my thesis on ‘the unlocked door’ in Flowers From the Storm. Or the Heideggerian ‘Dasein’ of these MCs. How about a Foucault’s Madness and Civilization case study? Like these philosophers, this book was getting at some core of The Human Experience™️—and I was living!

The asylum scenes were hard to read—yet I was fascinated by the rawness of this book’s exploration of themes that we’re still grappling with, 30 years after this was published. Because this felt so 1992, in a good way. Rodney King just happened, Silence of the Lambs was a thing, Girl Interrupted was about to be published… revealing the hypocrisy, the inhumanity, even brutality, of systems was a part of the Zeitgeist. And what shocked a reader in 1992 fills a reader in 2023 with a kind of knowing dread… which made this feel even more impactful.