Spring Flowering

by Farah Mendlesohn

Everything changes for Ann Gray when her father dies and her closest friend Jane marries and moves away. Ann must give up the independence and purpose she found as mistress of her father's parsonage in the country, and move to her uncle and aunt's new-style house in the growing city of Birmingham. The friendship of Ann's cousins - especially the mathematically inclined Louisa - is some compensation for freedoms curtailed. But soon Ann must consider two very different proposals, either of which will bring yet more change. Should she return to her village home as wife of the new parson Mr. Morden? Or become companion to the rather deliciously unsettling widow Mrs. King...?

Genres: Romance, Historical Fiction, Historical, LGBT, Historical Romance, Lesbian, Regency

214 pages, ebook

First published November 1, 2017

About the author

Farah Mendlesohn is a Hugo Award-winning British academic and writer on science fiction. In 2005 she won the Hugo Award for Best Related Book for The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, which she edited with Edward James.

Mendlesohn is Professor of Literary History at Anglia Ruskin University, where she is also Head of English and Media. She writes on Science Fiction, Fantasy, Children's Literature and Historical Fiction. She received her D.Phil. in History from the University of York in 1997.

Her book Rhetorics of Fantasy won the BSFA award for best non-fiction book in 2009; the book was also nominated for both Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

In 2010 she was twice nominated for Hugo Awards in the Best Related Books category.

She was the editor of Foundation - The International Review of Science Fiction from 2002 to 2007. She formerly was Reviews Editor of Quaker Studies.

Reviews

[K.J. Charles]

A f/f historical at a non-eyewatering price is still a rare and precious thing, plus I heard the author speak at a conference and she was amazing, so I was on this like a rat up a drainpipe.

The historical grounding is amazing. This is the most vivid, immersive daily life depiction, and of relatively normal middle class people too. I was fascinated by the manufactories in particular, and the way women's position in work was changing, but all the details of life and work were gloriously real. What a joy.

The pacing is definitely not conventional for a romance, and I think it's probably more of a What Ann Did Next novel: her life going through grief and the loss of her home, building a new life, coming to terms with her sexuality in a world that doesn't give her any useful terms to use (but is not unwelcoming, which is lovely), and finally working her way to understand who she is and what she wants, and with whom. I would have liked the ending 20% to have more space to breathe myself, but then I like a good wallow.

Fabulous female friendships and family-building too. I really enjoyed this.

[Sprinkles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, this is certainly different than what I've been reading lately. Still pretty, still gay (of course), but I was transported to a world of bonnets and corsets and paragraphs picturesque landscaping. And it was a welcome change! You will learn a lot about the various settings and if the plot and action keeps a hold of you, it won't be dreary.

Ann is interesting and honestly someone I could picture as a lead in the lastest Netflix originals. To see her romance blossom is a thing of beauty, but I warn more impatient readers that it's something to earn. Farah Mendlesohn paints the setting, sets the tone of the period and Ann's state, as well as the ongoings of the family. I found it refreshing to go back in time for a spell; I'm used to present-day romances full of internet access and cars.

And this is a personal fave: becoming acquainted so many new terms! Dated or not, they're now part of my vocabulary.

I don't want to give away too much. As Corrie puts it, the story really takes off in the last 20%.

Do you see that 'wincest' tag on my shelf? There's some... cousin loving. If anything like that squicks you out, you've been warned.

Mrs. King was so suspect and I found her mighty fine anyways. Her toppy sex scenes with Ann were freaking hot. Any sort of interaction with King had my heart a-flutter.

Mr. Morden was nice enough. I could've done away with the bits describing their outings with him. I justed wanted more gay stuff to happen. Mrs. King had me enamoured.

There are a few hmmm moments for me near the end. Everyone seemed a little too accepting. However, did I enjoy the story? Very much so. Did the passion kick up my heart rate? Yes, indeed. Would I recommend? Sure, but only to those who aren't put off by what I mentioned earlier.

Right now, I'm thinking a little over 4 because it made my heart skip several beats. I'm hopeless that way. :)

[Dee · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

This story is told in third person and completely from Ann’s point of view. As per the blurb, which is extremely telling, everything changes for Ann when her father dies. She moves in with her Aunt and Uncle, and whereas the noise and a busy household are unsettling, Ann’s biggest hurdle to overcome is how to fill her day. With not much more to do than mend clothes and iron, like Ann, I found myself incredibly bored.

The pacing of this story was extremely slow. There was no urgency, no hook, nothing much to keep me reading, other than the fact I accepted a review copy. The positive side of saying that is around the 80% mark this story took a surprising turn.

The ending could be considered rather unconventional, considering the relationship between the two characters who eventually, surprisingly, ended up together.

For me to love a book, I need to be able to connect to at least one of the characters and that didn’t happen in this instance, the abundance of telling didn’t help with my disconnect. Ann felt, Ann knew, Ann realized, Ann thought, etc, etc.

This wasn’t a bad book, it just wasn’t for me. If you enjoy historical lesbian fiction with an extremely languid pace, and a sex scene or two to spice it up, this could be just the ticket.

Reviewed for Love Bytes LGBTQ Book reviews
http://lovebytesreviews.com/book-revi...

[Corrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spring Flowering by Farah Mendlesohn.

Wow, ok… so it was really in the last 20% of the book when we started to get to the meat of the story. Before that it was as someone aptly described “this-is-a-story-of-what-Ann-did-next”. After what you may ask?

Well for that we better start at the beginning.

Ann Gray is the bookish daughter of parson William Gray and we enter the story as Ann is sitting at her father’s death-bed reminiscing about the people she lost in her life - her brother John died at Waterloo when Ann was 16 and her mother died 4 years ago of fever. After her father’s death this life in the small village will come to an end as she is going to relinquish her independence to live with her Uncle and Aunt James in Birmingham. Ann is also saying goodbye to her closest childhood friend Jane who is about to marry.

The story is all about how Ann works through her grief, the loss of her home, her life in Birmingham, coming to terms with her sexuality (eventhough there was no real acknowledgement for that back then), to find out what she wants to do with her life and who she wants to share it with.

It’s well written and historically informative, you can tell the author is an academic in that field. But the pacing is not really what you expect in a romance novel. There are gorgeous historical details about how people ran a household, their customs, how they occupied themselves, what they ate and how frugal they were. At the 60% mark of the book there is still plenty of exposition about the city of Birmingham (where the author grew up) and its new building development. And all I wanted at that point was to spend more time with Mrs. King (sigh).

Spring Flowering reminds me of Jane Austin and the whole situation with the new parson Mr. Morton made me think of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Collins (although maybe less bumbly). I like Ann Gray. She is kind, sensible and has a good head on her shoulders. She reads Euclid and solves mathematical problems. A good heroine for this story.

I don’t want to spoil the romance in this book because there are some nice twists when we finally come to it. Most of all it’s a well written novel about family life in Regency England. If you love the period and women loving women in a historical setting I can really recommend this book.

f/f explicit
Themes: keeping it in the family, the girls did more than braid each other’s hair, we are not in Warwickshire anymore, Oohh… Mrs. King has a roving eye, why are we talking about state of the soil around Birmingham when we can explore what Mrs. King wants to do with Ann?, I love historical exposition as much as the next girl… but…, Mrs. King only seems to want a pillow princess, kissing cousins, those crafty Georgian women were so handy with needle and thread, I mean… making a ring out of a lock of hair.
4 stars

[Bee]

I'm looking into queer regency romances for one of my essays, if you have any recommendations, please share them!

[Wollstonecrafthomegirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

**Spoilers below**

This gets some points for sheer originality. There don’t seem to be that many f/fs on the market, let alone historicals. Plus, this is set in Birmingham, where I worked and lived for several years, and it was rather a delight to read descriptions of familiar streets layered with the history of the time at which they were built. The author is an historian of Brum and you can really tell. It’s a great, but unusual setting for an historical and makes for a great middle class, industrial setting.

Plus, the early love interest of our main protagonist gets married and goes to live in Solihull. There is something glorious about the closeted lesbian getting married and moving to Solihull.

Anywayyy, aside from my own very personal reasons for enjoying the book, the experience was somewhat uneven.

The writing is a bit heavy with detail at first, with some not inconsiderable repetition. But the author finds her stride as it goes on and those elements, which might have caused me to put the book down, drop away.

The romance is, odd. This is a book written entirely from the point of view of one main protagonist, Ann. This isn’t that unusual, of course (numerous Carla Kelly books proceed on this basis and very successfully). However, in this case I was proceeding on the basis that I knew who the love interest was (with the result that I was annoyed we hadn’t seen a lot more of her by the 50%+ mark) and, in fact, I was completely wrong. Perhaps I should have had the realisation earlier (the signs are there, but they completely escaped me at the time).

However, I’m less inclined to blame myself [magnanimous, as ever], and more inclined to set this as a strike against the book. I don’t object to a love triangle, but there needs to be an extensive focus on the primary romance. That doesn’t necessarily mean word count, but significance and clarity of interaction which marks the couple out (see also: Carla Kelly, One Good Turn).

None of that was helped by the fact that the primary love scenes didn’t involve the primary love interest. Again, not an automatic mark against this book, but when the main romance gets short shrift in terms of equivalent love scenes, it becomes a problem. I want the true h/h to get the moment they deserve and I felt I had been a little robbed of it here.

That said, I liked Ann, I liked her personal growth and how her character developed in difficult circumstances. And I liked Louisa, even more so when I realised it was her I was supposed to be rooting for.

So, all in all: uneven, but sufficiently entertaining. I would definitely be interested in reading more by the author. 3 stars.

[Nick Imrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story was extraordinarily dull, but not at all boring.

I don't believe there was a single joke in the whole book. Hardly any conflict at all. Just serious, sober, religious, hard-working, kind-hearted people going about their business.

I realise I'm not really selling it, but I did enjoy it. It's clearly very historically accurate. Some of this is a bit superfluous, like the meticulous updates on Birmingham building works. The rest of the history is seamlessly integrated into the story - the details of the women's everyday lives make this one of the most believable historical novels I've read in a long time. I don't mean just that it's plausible, I mean that it genuinely gives you an insight into how differently people lived in the past - from the Sunday meal being cold because the servants were gone out to church, to the endless sewing and hemming, to the whitework that Ann keeps in her pocket for spare moments! I also appreciated the skillful depiction of women's place in society. It was very satisfying to see women using their skills and contributing to the family business without any anachronistic feisty feminism.

The same skill was brought to depicting the lesbian romance. It struck just the right note to put it properly in context. The lovers were not anachronistically self-aware of themselves as lesbians, instead they were just 'unsuited to marriage'. The guardians and parents naturally assumed that marriage and children is the first choice and best option for any young lady, yet they also accept that sometimes two girls just want to set up house together, while clearly only some of them understood who's friends and who's friends.

The romance however, is largely confined to the end of the story. Most of the book is Ann's life as she mourns for her father and settles into Birmingham. I really can't express how little happens. Ann goes for walks with her uncle. Ann does some sewing at home. Ann notices her cousin has a problem, she brings it to her uncle's attention and suggests a solution, he implements the solution, the problem is resolved. There is some chaste courtship.
As a story it's so gentle that it's almost imperceptible. As a dialogue with other historical romances it's really rather wonderful. It's probably the most realistic regency romance I've ever read; it's only a shame that in reality, so many regency ladies led such quiet lives.

[Heather Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spring Flowering by Farah Mendlesohn is a gentle, domestic Regency romance, more in the vein of Jane Austen with its parson’s daughters and the family dynamics of middle class families “in trade”, than in the vein of Georgette Heyer’s dashing aristocrats and gothic perils. Ann Gray’s life is disrupted by the death of her father, the village parson, and she joins the bustling household of her cousins in Birmingham where the family business manufacturing buttons, jewelry, and other small metal accessories becomes the framework of her new social life. Until her father’s illness and death, Ann’s life had been taken up by the responsibilities of ministering to the needs of her father’s parish. Her future is open and unsettled now, with only the formalities of mourning to give her a breathing space to consider the options. Her loved ones--both the Birmingham family and her beloved special friend Jane, who has recently married--expect her to jump at the impending offer of marriage from the young curate who has taken her father’s place. But Ann thinks she doesn’t feel as she ought toward a man with whom she would spend the rest of her life, and an offer of a very different nature has arisen from the handsome widow, Mrs. King, soon to be a business partner of her uncle.

Mendlesohn’s novel is a refreshingly different sort of lesbian romance, depicting the attitudes and mores of the times with a social historian’s eye. The characters are neither anachronistically modern in their self-awareness of sexuality, nor anachronistically tormented and angsty about it. The physicality of Ann’s romantic friendship with her friend Jane is portrayed as completely ordinary for her times, but just as ordinary is Jane’s expectation that Ann will share her joy in her marriage. Through Ann’s explorations of new ties in Birmingham, we see how women who longed for same-sex friendships to be primary in their lives communicated and negotiated those feelings without needing to challenge social rules, as well as how families all too aware of the gender imbalance in the wake of the Napoleonic wars could encourage and approve of “surplus women” creating their own domestic arrangements. There are several very tasteful but explicit sex scenes that are well integrated into the overall emotional and self-realization arcs.

Although romance (with a few surprises) is the culmination of this novel, it is not the dominant theme throughout. Spring Flowering is a quiet tale of families and everyday life in Regency England, sweeping the reader into a world both familiar and intriguingly different in its details. There are a very few places where those details seemed to bog down the already leisurely pacing with a touch of “researcher’s syndrome,” but never in a way that derailed the story, as long as you approach the book as the story of a life rather than as a genre romance.

If you’ve longed to read stories of women loving women in history with happy endings that ground their love and their happiness in the spirit of the times, then Spring Flowering will be a breath of fresh air and a hope for a new wave of lesbian historical fiction.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really a romance novel, more of a coming-into-one's-own novel. Odd, in that the details are clearly meticulously researched, but the tone of the whole doesn't feel plausible. And quite dull, but in a plodding, comfortable way.

If you're looking for f/f Georgette Heyer - this ain't it.

[Highlyeccentric · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this a lot - but I could have loved it more. I adored Our Heroine (those who recall my problems with Persuasion and wanting to hear about the older sister who managed the accounts will not be surprised), I loved the setting and the web of supporting characters and the way that Anne's prior passionate friendship remains part of the picture.

I just. Didn't really grok the main ship. Or I did, but I wanted it further developed. I love the way it was worked out: keep everything in the family, guys, family is business is marriage is life partnership. But I just... wanted more depth to the relationship throughout. They only had one major misunderstanding and it came at a relatively early stage in their relationship arc, and... ugh. Give me a thing I like and I will want it to be better, basically.

[MJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

ok so i have been DYING from the complete lack of f/f historical that isn’t depressing as fuck and this book does fit the bill. so of course i picked this up IMMEDIATELY when i saw it recommended on twitter by one of my favorite authors.

things that are great about this book: happy ending! lesbians just getting to live together in peace! fun family dynamics! so much research and time and love clearly went into writing this!

BUT the pacing really threw me off my groove, at times this read more like a recitation of all of the aforementioned (through! and fascinating! but still mostly not germane to the plot) research that clearly went into the writing than an actual romance story. i skimmed a lot about the qualities of the soil outside birmingham, for instance, or the details of daily life as the wife of a boarding school teacher.

things just seem to happen to and around ann, and also everything comes insanely easily to her. i didn’t feel like there were any stakes. i wanted her to be happy and i’m glad she is, but i felt like i floated through this read and so i’m pinning it at 3 stars.

all that said, i definitely recommend picking it up.

[K Fabian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was this regency f/f romance written for me? It really could have been. Much more in the style of Austen than Heyer, and fascinating for it. There are words, phrases and lacunae in Austen (and similar books written at the time) that can to a modern reader imply sexual relationships between women -- by using them in this way here, the author creates space in the the original texts for that same interpretation, giving the gift not just of this beautiful gem of a book, but a whole backlog of newly queered regency writing.

Lovely, sweet plot; deeply likeable characters; and just a real joy to read. :)

[Ariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

All the Regency romances I've read and none of them were about how to live as a lesbian. Very well done and a bit spicy here and there!

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stumbled across Spring Flowering as part of my research into queer regency romances for my PhD. In particular I was looking for regency romances published by queer publishers or coming from a queer perspective, let me tell you there aren't many!

That being said I really enjoyed Spring Flowering. It falls very much into the Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer style of regencies, with a lot of focus on defining the society and following the main heroine's journey as she establishes her place in the world.

The historical details in Spring Flowering are clearly well researched and I did get a kick out of reading about Birmingham in a regency romance while being in Birmingham. Digbeth in particular is an area I know fairly well so it was fun to see it thrown back in time, so to speak!

Like other readers I would agree that it is only really at the 80% mark that the romance element of Spring Flowering gets started. Before that it is very much a novel about Ann Gray transitioning into a new life after the death of her father and moving in with her relatives. You can see hints of the romance but nothing is really acted upon until the 80% mark.

The romance between Ann and Louisa (her cousin) does happen quickly but it felt well-paced and considering all the build-up it also felt believable. I liked that Mendlesohn didn't show Ann and Louisa as being in an isolated bubble due to their sexuality, instead they both have previous same-sex experience and are even aware of other women in Birmingham who like other women. It made the society feel richer.

Overall I enjoyed Spring Flowering, but would have preferred a greater focus on the romance between Louisa and Ann. So for that reason I've given it 4*.

[K.B. Rainwater · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF

Spent too much time on descriptions in the first couple of pages. Didn't give me any reason to be engaged.

[Morgan Dhu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Farah Mendlesohn is best known for her literary criticism, much of it in the areas of fantasy, science fiction, and children’s literature. To these scholarly credits she must now add the accolade of a writer of delightful queer historical romance.

Spring Flowering is the story of Ann Gray, a 27-year-old parson’s daughter who finds herself on the brink of a life of her own following the death of her father. Leaving the parsonage where she grew up for the new world of Birmingham, where her uncle owns and operates a fancy metalwork business, Ann is surrounded by new people, new sights, and new ideas.

But welcome though she is in her uncle’s lively establishment, Ann is not fully content. Accustomed to managing her father’s household after her mother’s death, Ann is now a supernumerary in her aunt’s home. Her cousin Louisa, with whom she has the most in common, has begun to work in the family business - something that Ann had encouraged her uncle to consider, for it was clearly something Louisa longed to do, yet it has left her without a companion. She finds no interest in the courtship offered by Mr. Morden, the young curate who took over her father’s parish. And Jane, the bosom friend of her youth, with whom she had shared a passionate friendship, is now married.

Thus, Ann finds herself both intrigued and somewhat distracted by by the stylish, somewhat older Mrs. King, a widow who has entered into a business partnership with her uncle - especially when Mrs. King offers her the position of governess to her two sons, who are to be educated along with her own cousin, her uncle’s young son and heir, as they will be the next generation of partners in the family business. The offer is exciting, and yet, when Ann goes to visit Jane for a few weeks, it is Louisa whom she finds herself missing most.

The story unfolds slowly and gently, with a keen eye fir the rhythms of family, business and social life that is both entertaining and rewarding.

Behind the story of Ann’s slow flowering, Mendlesohn presents a detailed picture of merchant class life in the early 19th century. I find myself reading about Uncle James and his factory and trade outlet, and thinking that this is what I didn’t see in Jane Austen’s stories - this is something like the life, for instance, that Elizabeth Bennett’s beloved Aunt and Uncle would have lived in London, at a time when family and business were still interwoven. We see hints of the coming industrial age, as successful family-centred trades slowly increase in scope becoming concentrated capital projects. Craftsmen are on the verge of being replaced by labourers at machine lines, even while social changes are bringing about such progressive trends as greater freedom for women and abolition of the slave trade.

Mendlesohn handles the queer aspects of the romance with a deft touch, and it is pleasant to read a lesbian historical romance in which no one seems distressed that Ann does not warm to men, that she has had one ‘particular friendship’ already in her life, and that she is being delicately courted by a woman known to have had such ‘particular friendships’ herself.

To quote the final line in the book, “It all felt very satisfying indeed!”

[Tocotin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really excited for this book! The cover is so pretty, and I wanted to read a sweet historical lesbian romance with well-bred ladies finding happiness despite everything.

There are well-bred ladies, and they do find happiness, but there is almost no conflict, save for very mild misunderstanding and a bit of cute jealousy. I’m not saying that I need the main characters to be driven up a tree and to have dogs sicked on and stones thrown at them – but in order to cheer these characters on, and to be happy for them when they reach their goal, I’d like to have some uncertainty and suspense. I love historical stories in which marginalized people, poor people, women etc. overcome historically realistic obstacles and manipulate their way to happiness; no, I don’t want to see their suffering, but I don’t want to see them getting everything handed out on a silver platter, either.

But while there was enough realism to make the first part (or should I say, first 70%?) of the book positively dull, there was not enough of it to make the final victory of Ann and her beloved quite plausible. There are at least two moments in which Ann makes it crystal clear to her family/acquaintances that she intends to not marry because she’d like to live with another woman, and casually mentions that there are other women like her – and there are no consequences. Again, I’m not looking for persecution and trauma in a romance, but the “yeah, whatever” reaction of the other characters was disappointing and bewildering. I couldn’t help comparing the way it was handled here with Patience and Sarah which I read a month ago, and which is also a story of two women finding happiness together in an early 19th century Western society. Both books have other characters treat the main couple with kindness and decency; but the heroines of Patience and Sarah have to fight for their love, have to make others understand that it is something true and serious, have to overcome their own fears and doubts, and the reactions of people around them to their love do not seem anachronistic.

What else? The uneventful lives of middle-class English ladies is depicted in loving detail, and I appreciated that the characters lived in Birmingham and not in London or Bath or another done-to-death location. The language was okay – maybe a bit too self-conscious and stiff, no contractions etc. I think that the last 20%–30% of the book was pretty hot. Mrs King was my favorite character and I wanted to have more of her. *sigh*

[WhatAStrangeDuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read way too many books by authors from the 19th century where the female protagonist (or their best friend or sister or whoever) ended up either dead, mad or married. I'm not saying that I didn't to some extent enjoy reading them but what I really wanted was for Lizzy and Charlotte from "Pride and Prejudice" to have their HEA.

Anyhow, this is a Regency romance without dashing aristocrats of either gender but rather well-heeled merchant families. There is a bit of social commentary going on, a good cast of quite intelligent women who'd rather occupy themselves with mathematics or engineering than with doing embroidery (which makes me think of George Eliot) and the GIRL gets the GIRL! If there is a tiny bit of sprinkling of fairy dust going on to achieve the magically gay-ok, I say - bring it on!

I could have done with a bit more space for the actual development of the romantic relationship but all in all it left me with a big smile on my face and since I'm for some reason hyper-critical of lesbian romance that is a very, very good thing. It's also well-written and well-researched and has a nicely fleshed out ensemble of secondary characters. Recommended!

[Cnut · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore historical fiction, but it's very hard to find historical lesbian fiction where one of the women doesn't end up dead. This hits all the right notes: a Regency story that's really immersive, as well as the sort of subtle romance you expect of the era (especially when gay relationships are involved). Some people apparently find the book too slow and plodding, but there's nothing I love more than loving descriptions of the era with weird archaic words I've never seen before and have to look up. It makes me feel as though we're actually in the time period, rather than modern times given a coat of Regency paint.

Ann, as the main character, is very fully developed, and as a reviewer said on Amazon, not "anachronistically tormented and angsty" about her feelings for women, While there are obvious hardships on her path to love, we also get to see some of the more ingenious solutions queer people (and their families) devised in those days to survive.

I really look forward to more works by this author!

[Rhiannon Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this a charming, light read. The focus is more on the central character than on a specific relationship. It wasn't clear to me until fairly well into the story where the relationships were going - as other reviewers have noted, this is odd for a romance, but highly effective for a story about Ann's journey of personal and sexual discovery. The latter worked for me because I quickly liked Ann. (That said, I would read a sequel from Louisa's point of view, because I could really like her too!) The historical setting is well-drawn and I especially enjoyed recognising some of the locations around Birmingham. Very much a story about women finding their own way in the world - not quite 'coming of age', but 'coming into one's own'.

[Kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

The prose is perfect for the time period and there are lots of details to appeal to any reader with an interest in historical dress and crafts. I can't fault the writing at all. Where the book lost me is the heroine's meandering attractions. It was impossible to figure out which relationship the reader should be invested in and I would have been much more on board with the cousin-romance if it was developed as an exclusive relationship from the start, or even made clear to the reader that this is the pairing we should be rooting for while the MC frolics with someone else.

[Viviane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this. The details were fun and I would have happily kept reading, or should I say I'd definitely read another story like it by the author? Both really.
I have learned a lot about Birmingham, sometimes I got lost in the various roads and sights to be honest, but I still enjoyed the meandering.
Yes, pace was slow, but it was exactly what I needed at the time and worked well for me to be honest.
There are some plot twists I wasn't sure about, but I still enjoyed it immensely.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully immersive, slow-paced until the end. Much more of a story of a young woman coming into her place in the world than a romance, and the romance wasn’t what I expected, either! I loved the gentle acceptance of Ann’s family members and the way she found herself over time — it felt very much like I imagine such a thing might have unfolded for a lucky lesbian in times before our own. I’d love to read more by this author if she writes more fiction!

[Ry Herman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gently-paced romance with no real villains. I appreciated that the characters' thoughts and reactions were kept in what seemed to me to be an authentic context for the period, with little said outright and much understood. The historical detail got a little intrusive at times, but this was a minor problem with a generally pleasant and enjoyable book.

[Lotta]

This definitely didn't read as a romance to me, more like a book about finding yourself. The romantic relationship was not the central focus. I felt that the relationship or the characters weren't developed satisfactorily in the book, and that the book would have benefited greatly by a round of editing.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book reminded me of Austen's in terms of style. I like how the romantic false lead isn't a villain, just not the right person for Ann (and vice versa). I particularly love how supportive various characters are of Ann! I would love to read more about Ann and Louisa and Mrs. King at some point.

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought for sure I had already written a review of this, but it seems to have disappeared?

[lauraღ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved everything about this cute romance except the fact that the author used the phrase "the soft furry catness" to describe a snatch. I'm still laughing and boggling.

The romance didn't go the way I expected, and in a lot of ways it was more of a coming of age story. But I liked it very much. Maybe Ann's family's implicit acceptance isn't realistic or whatever, but I find that it's just what I needed at this moment in my life.

A cute read. 3.5 stars.

[Kate Long · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stars: 4 Stars
Format: Digital
Steam Level: Steamy

TW: dog dies right in the first chapter

Why did I wait so long to get and read this? I loved it! It is a bit steamy but not super explicit.

Quick Thoughts:
- Really enjoyed all the characters, even the ones that annoyed me at first
- Unusual for me, I ended up liking all the love interests. Even the ones that didn’t work out. There was no “evil” one, just people with flaws that are trying to make connections that best suited them
- Some typos and wrong word tenses but easily ignored. The vocabulary had me very glad this was an ebook that I could highlight the word and look it up in seconds
- The story, while a romance, doesn’t really read like one. It’s more about Ann’s every day and the time period, and then who she ends up with. Lots of detail about the place she ends up living and the business of her Uncle’s
- Please remember that this takes place in the very early 1800s and cousins marrying was something that happened. Only mentioning it because I know it would bother some people

Overall I really enjoyed this story! Yes, I would have liked more story of Ann and her love interest and more of what happens after all the plans are made, but that’s because I enjoyed this so much not that the story felt incomplete.

[Z. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoy the author's writing style, which has a nice classical feel and historical detail. That's what compelled me to keep reading, because after a strong beginning I felt that the main character became a bit tedious. She has a few suitors, male and female, and while the bait-and-switch plot was interesting and unexpected -- it was pretty clear that Louisa had fallen for Ann, but Ann's own feelings were developed more subtly -- I found the love interest I expected to be more interesting. And honestly although I have no problem reading relationships between first cousins in actual classics, I found it weird in a modern romance novel. YMMV.