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 “widow shopping spree for black clothes.” She puts a lock of her husband’s 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 “an undetermined time period.” 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 “proper grief stationery, black clothes, [and] keepsake jewelry” 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, “What would a Victorian widow do?” 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’s best friend in large part because a Victorian widow would not be sitting on a sofa next to her husband’s best friend, unchaperoned, in the first place. And if black leggings qualify as widow’s 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.
