The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows

The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows (2020) Olivia Waite (Feminine Pursuits)

Set in England in 1820

Let’s start with what I loved about this story:

The history. The politics.

George had at the same time enjoyed a cheery reunion with his mistress, Lady Coyningham, whose husband had recently been elevated to the Privy Council in return for the man’s great kindness in overlooking adultery.

The details about printing.

Eliza skimmed the congealed skin off the top of the ink, and used a knife to spread a thin liquid layer on the glass-topped table next to the press. A single sheet of paper went into the tympan, atop layers of cloth padding to soften the blow of the plate; the frisket came down to protect the edges from ink, its cut-out center square framing and presenting the blank page.

The details about bee keeping.

(T)o get the bees to fill the jars properly. The sides need to be rubbed with wax first on the inside, for instance. Otherwise the bees will just slip off and never leave anything there for you to harvest.

What didn’t work for me (as expected) was the boinking. I skimmed all of it.

The other thing that I had problems with were the letters towards the end.

Specifically.

Imagine what we could get up to in seven entire nights…

And then followed a page of such dazzling and specific lechery that Penelope flushed head to heel.

Because it followed this:

The ( ) Auxiliary Branch of the Society for the Suppression of Seditious Libel and Mendacity offers a bounty of
FIVE SHILLINGS
for information on activities or persons threatening to undertake activities of a seditious, blasphemous, or obscene nature.

They’d pissed off people in power, so it feels crazy that they’d actually have a written record of what they’d been (and would be) doing.

So that bothered me a lot, because I kept waiting for one of those letters to be intercepted or picked up in a search and then they’d truly and deeply be in trouble.

So, I liked the relationship and the romance and all the fascinating details about the time and their specific fields. But other bits threw me out of the story enough that I lost a fair amount of enjoyment.

Publisher: Avon Impulse
Rating: 6.5/10

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