I am completely ambivalent about this book by Katherine Sturtevant. I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it. It was just there.
The plot’s simple enough. Meg, the daughter of a bookseller in 17th century London, is upset because her father remarries, and she will lose her inheritance if/when her step mother has a baby. She has to learn to deal with the fact of a new stepmother (after 4 years of being alone with her father). She has to learn to deal with her life as a young woman (she’s 12 for half, 13 for the otherhalf) and learning all the “wifely arts” (she’s a reader, and would much rather work in the bookstore).
The most fascinating part was the talk of writers in London in the late 1600s. The plays, the books, the fact that there were woman authors. But, there wasn’t enough of it for my taste.
Maybe I’m just suffering from good book let down. The book after a really good one is never great, right?
The Book Nut 
I finally read Small Steps. Liked it all right, but felt the end was too sensational, and the characters were morally ambivalent–I couldn’t really tell how the author felt about them, much less how I did. I’m going to check out How Green Was My Valley.
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Hi,
I read this one not after a particularly good one and it still left me feeling pretty much the way you did. I keep it, because it has bookselling in there, otherwise it would be posted on amazon now.
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