A True and Faithful Narrative -- Katherine Sturtevant

Four years have passed since the events in At the Sign of the Star.  Meg Moore is sixteen, still helping in her father's bookshop, and, despite the disapproval of nearly everyone she knows, still wants to become a writer and marry a bookseller.

The last four years have brought lots of changes, too.  Her best friend, Anne Gosse, is engaged.  Meg now has two younger siblings, with another on the way.  She is well aware that each birth affects her dowry, and with it, her chances at a good marriage.  But she still isn't prepared when Anne's brother Edward -- who is not a bookseller -- makes his intentions known, offering to bring her back a gift from Italy:

My mouth fell open and I was flooded with horror, for it was clear that he offered me a courtship gift.  I knew not what to say, and it is a fault of mine that I cannot be still at such moments.  Instead, the wrong words fly from my tongue.

"Why, nothing, unless--yes, I so wish we had a narrative to rival Okeley's that we might sell at the sign of the Star.  Can you not manage to be captured by pirates, and enslaved in North Africa?"

She regrets her thoughtless words very much at the time, but much more so when he is actually captured by pirates and sold into slavery.

Her guilt leads her to work tirelessly for his release.  Eventually, she -- with the help of her father's apprentice -- raises the money.  When Edward returns to London, he wants Meg to be the one to write his narrative.

A True and Faithful Narrative is a fantastic sequel*.  Like its predecessor, it will draw you into Restoration London -- sights, sounds and smells -- and into Meg's life.  Like its predecessor, the characters are three-dimensional and again, Sturtevant never lets the sensibilities of our era swoop in and whisk Meg off to some magical feminist realm. 

But, wait.  There's more.  There's a maturity in this book that wasn't in the first one.  I'm sure that part of the reason lies in Meg's growing... er... maturity, but I think it was more than that, too.  While writing Edward's narrative, Meg doesn't just grow as a young woman, she grows as a writer. 

And don't forget that there's romance, too.  I'm starting to think I could get into this historical fiction thing.

*Yes, Virginia, it can be read as a stand-alone.