Get your first look at Always Be My Duchess.
Amalie Howard cannot get enough of ’90s rom-coms.
Pretty Woman,10 Things I Hate About You you name it, she probably loves it.
‘Always Be My Duchess,’ by Amalie Howard.Entangled
The result isAlways Be My Duchess, which hits shelves July 12 and will kick off a new series.
Talented ballerina Miss Genevieve Valery is out of work after refusing to become a patron’s mistress.
But of course, things get complicated when real feelings start to emerge.
Amalie Howard.Courtesy of Amalie Howard
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Where did you first get the idea forAlways Be My Duchess?
AMALIE HOWARD:The idea for this series came out of this complete love of everything ’90s rom-com movies.
And that’s how the original idea came about.
ForAlways Be My Duchess, it’s pretty much Jane Austen meetsPretty Woman.
You have the iconic red dress, you’ve got like the woman down on her luck.
How much wasPretty Womana direct inspiration?
She’s come from money but she doesn’t have it anymore.
And she has to make ends meet to look after her sister.
I was never prima-ballerina-level, but it was a long time and I really enjoyed it.
I wanted to put those elements together.
You’ve traditionally had photographic clinch covers, so this marks your first illustrated cover.
What has that transition been like for you?
I love illustrated covers.
They’re clever and they’re quirky.
I like the fact that on this particular cover, there’s the iconic red dress.
love the fact that it’s illustrated just because I’ve never had one before.
It’s really cute.
Kudos to theForeverdesign team.
Once you’re clear on what you’re looking for, there’s nothing lost in translation.
But for this one I basically said, “I’m hoping for a red dress.”
Just because that’s iconic forPretty Woman.
But the whole feel of it just works.
The color scheme works.
I love the font.
It’s really flirty, which is the direction we’re going for.
Neve is a French ballerina, and you studied in France.
How much did that inspire or influence your version of her character?
French Creole is in my ancestry.
My mom’s a French teacher.
She’s retired, but we spoke in French since I was really little.
I lived in Paris.
So I think it did translate quite a bit into just being a Francophile.
I hope that comes through, because it is part of her, even though she’s half-English.
Her father’s a viscount and her mother was a French opera dancer.
You mentioned you studied ballet.
Is dance a great passion of yours?
I wish I was better.
Every girl has this dream of being like a master.
I was not a master.
My body key in wasn’t perfect for a ballerina.
The body image piece is a huge part of dance life.
I love the idea of it.
I’ve seen almost every ballet movie, dance movie that there is to be seen.
Dance is a huge metaphor for this story.
You since revised the book and released it at a postponed date.
How did that experience change or impact your writing?
You touched on a really important word there, and that’s “impact.”
As creatives, we have to be super-conscious of intent versus impact.
A little bit on my background: I grew up in an ex-sugar colonial island.
We actually only obtained our independence from Britain in 1962.
So that wasn’t really that long ago.
The races there were majority races, so I wasn’t part of a marginalized racial group.
The way that I grew up was very different.
As a BIPOC person, I never want to cause harm to other BIPOc people.
If something is harmful or problematic, it’s important to listen and to do the work.
Obviously Twitter’s not a place where there’s a lot of nuance.
I couldn’t say, “Hey, I’m sorry.
This is where I was coming from.”
I don’t want to cause harm to my readers.
I love my readers.
But at the same time, how much do you want to sanitize history?
Here’s an example, with my heroine, some criticism came up about her and colorism.
She was her goddaughter.
And she faced huge amounts of racism in the court.
But everyone’s going to read through their own lens.
I think that’s what I did with my publisher.
I hope I did the work.
Because it was such a personal story for you, did the criticism feel particularly invalidating or challenging?
I was afraid to say, “This is my lived experience.
This is who I am.
Should I not be this person in my brown skin?
Am I brown enough?
Am I Indian enough for you?”
I’m of Indian, Middle Eastern, and French Creole descent.
That’s how the Caribbean is.
We’re just a huge melting pot of different races because of colonialism.
It’s a symbol of slavery and the atrocities that happened and colonialism and oppression.
I grew up with that mentality.
It’s hard because there’s not a lot of other Caribbean authors.
I know like three.
That’s a hard battle to fight.
I do kind feel there’s a little bit of a double standard.
Especially with social media, there’s little room for nuance or thoughtful discussion.
But what’s going to shift the tide is the publication of more stories, more voices.
I can only write from my own lived experience as a Caribbean-born West Indian woman.
You want to bridge that gap between the two a little bit to make it more accessible.
They did have smarts.
They did have skills.
What are three words to describeAlways Be My Duchess?
Frothy, romantic, and… impulsive.
