Agatha is the widowed owner of a London printing business, trying to keep her teenage son out of trouble and both of them out of the notice of the law. When a swarm of bees invades their nearby warehouse, she meets local beekeeper Penelope and finds herself with a new beehive to tend. The two women strike up a friendship, and Agatha finds herself spending more time at Penelope's home and walking the beekeeping rounds with her and talking about everything. Could this be more than friendship?

This was definitely a slow burn. Penelope and Agatha were both so tentative about a possible relationship, I wasn't sure it was ever going to happen. The surrounding characters were entertaining, although I felt like the plot involving morality in the village and in England at large was a little overlong. But Waite clearly did a lot of research for this book, and I got a good sense of the politics and societal attitudes of the early 1820s.

How dare this book not be published yet. I can’t wait to share it with everyone! Loved this even more than her first, and that was one of my favorites of all time.

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.