Unfortunately this book was just very uninteresting to me. I didn't care for Beatrice or her wallflower misfit friends, nor the scoundrel & MMC Stamford Wright.

We learn that she was marred while being removed from her mom's body at birth (??) so she has scars I guess and she's been told she's ugly her entire life - and I think she also has palsy so she doesn't have all her nerve endings?? So she's become a bookworm instead and when she inherits a London bookshop from her aunt she wants to turn it into a knitting hangout for her friends. Luckily she knows Mr. Wright since he was a carpenter working on her brother's estate at the beginning of the book. She pays him to help renovate the space. 

But he has an ulterior motive. He's actually the grandson of a wealthy man or aristocrat or something - but his grandfather uninherited his mother for falling for his dad - another carpenter. His mother accepted hush money when he was young from his grandfather. The bookshop Beatrice inherits is owned by his grandfather or something? So he wants to help keep it out of his hands. But he falls for Beatrice. Then Beatrice's mother does the same thing and tries to bribe him with 20000 pounds to disappear out of Beatrice's life so that she'll marry a duke. He refuses and intends to break it off with Beatrice but everything comes out and its all kind of meh. There's a somewhat funny confrontation near the end where all the kooky women threaten the grandfather with knitting needles and whatnot, and then Stamford proposes to Beatrice.

This trope and plot has just been done too many times. That and they act a bit too modern. There's literally a line where the women are like oh hoh well what if women did this and this that had me rolling my eyes. But the whole cringeworthy awkward FMC with body issues being ravished by the dashingly handsome, rogue MMC... There's just a lot of books that have done it better and with higher stakes than a bookshop and family legitimacy issues.