That’s it, that’s the chief problem to be dealt with in the book. Amelia is a young female novelist living in seclusion after she had a very public melt-down at a ball and can’t deal with people anymore, Sydney is a Quaker engineer still mourning the death of his brother and sister-in-law, who can be rather deaf to social nuance but means well and gets a bit wound up with it. They both, in mild ways, come across as people on the autism spectrum. Amelia in particular comes across as an Aspie who was raised with a hardcore Company Manners script and has a lot of residual anxiety about “people won’t like the real you”. In the tradition of a romance, they get to live happily ever after, in the manner they want to, though not in a conventional get-married-and-live-together way. (Amelia’s social anxiety doesn’t go away because she meets Sydney; she does get more comfortable managing it and expressing her limits. So it’s a win.)
The B-couple is just darling – Georgie and Lex can reliably make each other laugh, and that’s a pretty good way to start a marriage. There’s some stuff with histrionic historical novel-writing, and people gently twitting each other, and why a Quaker in particular might insist on getting the railroads he’s building right. We get to see a little of what’s going on in the lives of people from the earlier books. It’s short on alarums and excursions, but if you, like me, also deal with social anxiety, it really is rather lovely.
That said, I hated almost all of the character-voices Joel Leslie used, and found his narration a bit grating. Will be re-reading it, not re-listening to it.