ARC received via Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this one! I absolutely love queer historical romances; it's my favourite comfort genre by a country mile, and this was a good one.

I'm cis, so I can't comment too much on the trans rep in this one, but I did like how the author handled other people's perceptions of Alvy. Laura has no problem at all changing the framework by which she views her friend, once she's made aware that he isn't who she's always believed him to be. I liked their dynamic and the easy way they joked with one another, and how their familiarity and respect for one another was evident right from the off. Alvy in particular is a very enjoyable character, being very eccentric and also very tall, which is not, I recognise, a character trait, but is quite endearing. The actual romance was well-paced, given the length of the book, and felt believable.

It wasn't perfect; it definitely could have stood to be about twice the length, for a start. I would have loved to have read more about the printing press and the periodical they published. We only really got to see a couple of scenes of them messing around with the letters, and I think there was a real wasted chance for a meaty subplot and some historical detail there. I like novellas a lot, but I think this should have been a novel. That said, the author does an excellent job of establishing the principal characters, their personalities and their relationships within the small space of this book, and that's no mean feat.

The author also has a very strange habit of never using dialogue tags. I did a search for the word 'said' after I finished the book, and the word only actually crops up 7 times, and every single time it's in direct speech (i.e. "Do you remember that you said this?") and never as an active verb. This means that it's often very difficult to tell who's speaking, because we have whole swathes of back-and-forth dialogue without any of it attributed to one character. You can eschew dialogue tags in conversation with two characters, but only once you've already established the order of who's speaking; without initially making it clear who says the first sentence, the reader becomes lost. This was my only real gripe with the book, and reading the preview for the next book at the end of this one, it looks like that one suffers from the same problem, and I do hope that this is remedied before that one's published, because I'd like to read it!

All in all, this was a good little read, and I'll very happily look out for the author's next works.