After Lizzie Wells loses her husband, the professor of British literature finds the structure she needs to begin living the rest of her life in Victorian mourning customs. She goes on a \u201cwidow shopping spree for black clothes.\u201d She puts a lock of her husband\u2019s hair in a locket and wears a pendant marked with his fingerprint. She carries a tiny urn filled with his ashes in her handbag. She buys black-edged stationery and lets her students and colleagues know that she will not be answering email and only communicating via paper for \u201can undetermined time period.\u201d Watching an independent, 21st-century woman with a thriving career try to follow rules created for women whose entire identities were bound to their husbands could have made for a great novel, but this is about as far as Lizzie gets in adopting Victorian mourning customs. She acknowledges as much when she says that \u201cproper grief stationery, black clothes, [and] keepsake jewelry\u201d are gestures toward the full package. Much like her heroine, Reeves seems to think that gestures toward the premise she created are sufficient to fulfill its promise. Lizzie does occasionally remember to ask herself, \u201cWhat would a Victorian widow do?\u201d But most of what she does throughout the entire novel is not what a Victorian widow would do. A Victorian widow would not go to work, for example. A Victorian widow would not almost kiss her husband\u2019s best friend in large part because a Victorian widow would not be sitting on a sofa next to her husband\u2019s best friend, unchaperoned, in the first place. And if black leggings qualify as widow\u2019s weeds, then every woman who has ever taken a barre class is in deep mourning. The conceit becomes tiresome quickly, but it does serve as a distraction from what is otherwise a lackluster and slightly preposterous love story. These complaints may seem pedantic, but what could have been a fun crossover novel for fans of contemporary romance and historical romance is unlikely to satisfy either.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After Lizzie Wells loses her husband, the professor of British literature finds the structure she needs to begin living the rest of her life in Victorian mourning customs. She goes on a \u201cwidow shopping spree for black clothes.\u201d She puts a lock of her husband\u2019s hair in a locket and wears a pendant marked with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5094,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5093"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}