A truly delightful follow up to Waite's first book in this series. Agatha and Penelope are lovely and funny and so clearly smitten with each other from the start that it's a delight to watch them fall in love. The townsfolk are colorful and amusing and wonderfully queer.

Highly recommend this joyful book.

A lovely and slow-moving romance between two middle-aged, middle-class women in early 1800s England. This is a very plot-heavy book for a romance novel, with an interesting focus on contemporary political issues that I didn't know much about -- sedition laws and especially George IV's attempt to divorce his wife, Queen Caroline. One of the protagonists, Agatha, is a widow who runs a printing press, while the other, Penelope, is a sailor's wife who happens to be her village's expert in beekeeping. (The meet-cute is extremely cute: a swarm of bees infests Agatha's storage shelves, and Penelope comes to rehome the bees.) There are lots of very thoughtful details, including the relationship between Agatha's adult son and her apprentice (there is a really great scene early on in the book where all three of them talk about what they would do if they could change just one law: Sydney picks freedom of the press, Eliza picks universal suffrage, and Agatha picks the right to an easy, cheap divorce, which tells you so much about all three characters in so few words), the community in Penelope's village, and a subplot about a local musician and lyricist who's trapped in a bad marriage. There aren't many sex scenes, and it takes a while for Agatha and Catherine's relationship to become physical, but ones it does they're quite explicit, just FYI! Catherine from The Lady's Guide for Celestial Mechanics has a brief cameo appearance, but the books aren't closely related and I think they could be read independently of each other without anything being lost. Recommended especially for readers who like a lot of history in their romance -- I think KJ Charles fans would really enjoy this series.