I had the honor of beta reading for thi book and I must say if one day Merlina Garance's books stop replacing themselves in my favorite reads ranking, that will be the day I've lost all sense and taste and you might as well just put me out of my misery.

Dandelion has the beautifully crafted characters and relationships we're used to by now, but the writing style and tone have significantly shifted if you take the Leicester trilogy as comparison. This book is sweet, angsty and thoughtful like them, but somehow more intense, more real, more cruel in a way and more reassuring in others.

This book shows the amount of dedicated research and careful drafting that Merlina Garance puts in all their works, and I would recommend it to every fan of historical romance, queer history nerds and readers who live for a good dose of "anxiously pining x pining with fake composure" in their books.