2023 Victorian romance. Naomi Kwan is registering for an "ambulance"
(first aid) class, and finds she needs a fiancé to be taken seriously.
Liu Ji Kai turns up at just the right moment, and is prepared to go
along with a fake engagement. But he's the son of a confidence
trickster who made himself deeply unwelcome in Wedgeford, and now he's
come back… to make pottery?
And thank goodness, again, that this is a romance with grown-ups
in it. What in a lesser book would be a surprise revelation leading to
a Big Misunderstanding and a third-act breakup is dealt with on the
spot: yes, you should have told me that, yes, this person has implied
some very damaging things about you, but I've also met you as a
person, and rather than storming off in a snit we can talk about it
and sort it out. Which frankly I find much more compatible with the
idea that these people are meant to have fallen in love with each
other and hope to make a life together.
Which perhaps means less depth of emotional despair, but I found I
didn't miss it. There's quite a bit of hard going anyway: Kai is
planning to leave after he's committed one big fraud—though not
against the locals this time—and he and Naomi try to keep this a
secret between them. He's labouring under the shadow of trying not to
be his father ("Chickens are meant to be plucked. Rejoice when they
are used for their intended purpose."); Naomi also has a poor
relationship with her parents, though it's quite a different one.
Much romance tends to be unexaminedly conservative: rich man takes
woman away from all this. (Which is the main reason I've read a few
lesbian romances lately, because those gender roles are either not
present or at least not sex-coded.) I first heard about Milan because
of her being pushed out of the Romance Writers of America for
mentioning a racist character portrayal in a review of a book by a
commissioning editor, and I'm glad to find that this second book of
hers I've read continues the pattern of being modern, inclusive, and
good in its own right.