Aimie K. Runyan's Daughters of New France series could have been written about my ancestors. So, as I read the first two books, I pictured what it must have been like for them to leave France and come settle here in Canada. The detail and research was excellent and appreciated. I look forward to reading her other books.

Duty to the Crown by Aimie K. Runyan is the follow up story to Promised to the Crown. This book follows the lives of three very different women as they struggle to make a life in New France, present day Quebec Canada, between 1677 and 1680. Several facts in this story are not historically correct but the lives of the women show what it was like to be a female during this time of history. I would suggest reading the first book first as we do meet many of the characters in that book, but it can be read as a standalone novel.

Manon is a young Huron girl who was raised by a French family. She is struggling with her identity in this book as she feels she does not fit in with either the Huron or the French settlers. Gabrielle, the daughter of a drunk who went to work for a husband and wife who were bakers in the first book. They have taken her in as their ward, but due to laws and traditions, she must marry by her 16th birthday, and in desperation marries a man she barely knows. Claudine travelled to New France with her sister earlier, but now yearns to return to France. Unfortunately she does not have the money to do this so she is forced to use her beauty, talents and intellect to attract a rich husband. These are three girls who could not be more different, in temperament, upbringing, and ambition, yet they come together in this young colony, as friends.

I am not sure if woman today could go through what they did. I can't imagine being forced into marriage or the way society treated them. We have come a long way in many areas such as safe pregnancies and births, the ability to get educated, dealing with abusive relationships, and being able to choose who we marry, specifically marrying for love. This was a very interesting read and I have become attached to these women. I hope there is a third book in this series coming.

Lysander reflects that “The course of true love never did run smooth…” in Act 1, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The play is not my favorite, but the line speaks to a truth few writers are willing and/or able to recreate. We all know that ‘happily ever after’ endings sell like hotcakes, but the reality of love is far more complicated than most fiction suggests.

Romantic love is obviously the most popular, but familial, parental, spiritual, and communal love, are equally powerful and important which is what Claudine Deschamps, Gabrielle Giroux, and Manon Lefebvre discover in Aimie K. Runyan’s Duty to the Crown. Each faces a unique set of challenges, but when all is said and done, it is the relationships they form along the way that see them through.

I give Runyan a lot of credit for tackling a number of complex social issues through the trials and tribulations for her three heroines and I don’t mean to downplay the historic value of the novel in any way, but it was her illustration of Quebec’s greater community of women that captured my imagination. It is obvious that a great deal of research when into this piece and that the author has a lot of respect for both French and Canadian culture, but the strength and fortitude of the nation’s founding mothers is first and foremost among her chosen themes and I greatly appreciated how she chose to display and explore those ideas through her fiction.

Duty to the Crown is the second book the Daughters of New France series and while it isn’t entirely necessary to read the novels in order, I’d definitely recommend tackling the volumes chronologically.