Florence’s father is a bookbinder who returned home to Manchester from Jamaica with a baby for him and his mother to raise. Growing up with a father that seemed to despise everything about her from her fuzzy hair to her inquisitive nature Florence used books to feed her curiosity and fill in the space that loneliness created. After Florence’s father found her bringing shame to their family, she was thrown out with nowhere to go. When Florence intercepts her father’s mail, she found a letter requesting his expertise to restore a collection of rare books. After talking her way into the job Florence stumbles across a diary that belongs to the late lady of the house. As Florence reads the diary, she discovers there are many secrets in the house that she suspects lead to a murder that was covered up as a suicide. Now Florence is determined to find out what happened to Persephone Belfield.

I love a good historical fiction. This was a captivating story about a woman who was cast out by the only family she had ever known and found herself discovering things about herself she never knew while entering a whole new world of secrets and lies. This book starts off with a scandal but doesn’t tell you what the scandal is, so you have to patiently wait for it to be disclosed while also trying to figure out what happened to the late Lady Persephone. The path I thought the story would take was not at all where the book went, but I was very pleased by that. There were several different themes in this book from passing, LGBTQ+ representation, survival, and friendship. 

Florence had such a hard time and my heart broke for her, so I was glad she was able to find some sort of solace in the end. I did shed a tear or two in the end for Florence. I enjoyed the mystery behind what happened to Lady Persephone. This was a very complicated story with complex characters who were all just doing what they needed to do to survive in a world that deemed them unworthy whether it was because of the color of their skin, their gender, or their sexual preference. This was a great debut novel and I look forward to seeing what this author writes next. 

Content Warning: sexual assault