SIX STARS

It takes an extraordinary writer to tell an extraordinary story about ordinary people living ordinary lives. Erin Langston is one of those writers. In this Victoria-era historical romance, you won’t visit a ballroom or the modiste, sip lukewarm ratafia or avoid any scheming mamas. Instead, you’ll be utterly captivated by the smell of ink and low-quality pulp paper, enchanted by the art of manual typesetting, and seduced by the curves of a Columbian press in a dusty backroom of an unassuming print shop on London’s Fleet Street.

You’re also going to feel all of those things for Mr. Ethan Fletcher, the wearied, but always drop dead gorgeous, snacc who arrives in England only to fall absolutely prostrate at Miss Belle Sinclair’s fierce little feet. Did I mention he has shoulders for miles and a beard?

Langston’s second full length novel transports readers back into the arms of the families Travers and Sinclair, first introduced in her rightfully lauded 2023 debut, Forever Your Rogue. In The Finest Print, we learn that Gavin and Emilia Sinclair have raised two daughters, and that Gavin now serves as a common law judge at the High Courts. We also learn that Belle has a decidedly “improper” fascination with true crime. Over the past several years, she has been trying and failing to publish her book starring an intrepid female detective that solves fictional crimes inspired by her father’s cases.

Ethan is no stranger to career setbacks himself. He’s a self-made man who rose through the ranks of the printing industry by grit and determination, from unpaid apprentice to special reporter at the Boston Sentinel. But Ethan’s sights are set on publishing his own newspaper, and when he inherits his uncle’s print shop in London, he quits his job and sails to England with the expectation that he has finally found a path forward to realize his dreams. All of Ethan’s hard work seems to be for naught, however, when he arrives in London only to find that his uncle was deeply in debt. Ethan has ten weeks to pay back the outstanding loan, or he will be bankrupted by a business that wasn’t even his to begin with.

Fortunately for us, but especially for them, Ethan and Belle are the people who have exactly what the other needs. Ethan has paper and a printing press, and Belle can write something that a lot of people want to read. Although their dreams appear at first to be incompatible, their paths forward require both of them to be true to themselves and their own aspirations.

I started this book needing to send Gavin Sinclair a GREATEST DAD mug by the end of the prologue. Upon embarking on Chapter 1, I started laughing. Then flirtatious double entendre entered the chat, and I was DONE FOR(TM) by the time I hit Chapter 5. I only stopped to take a break because Ethan is a competent caregiving king and I needed a beverage refill. The ending brought me to tears over two regular people who have yearned for the opportunity make their own way in the world, quietly, and hand-in-hand.

The Finest Print is witty, passionate, and endearing, and Langston accomplishes this effortlessly through her masterful characterization and dialogue, and by elevating a sweet, simple story between two working class people into a love story every reader wishes they could live. She has also skillfully flipped the script when it comes to the structure of the typical romance novel, written in the tradition of subject-verb-object, which features barriers that exert pressure against the relationship of the MCs. In this novel, Ethan and Belle’s relationship is the subject instead of the object. It is their attachment that is the unshakeable force that drives the narrative forward, and that has the power to upend all of the barriers in their modest world.

Bravo to Ms. Langston, for this beautiful, heartfelt novel that will absolutely take readers' breaths away.