Joan Koster’s Censored Angel: Forgotten Women Book 2 is based on actual events. The book is divided into four parts. Part one chronicles Ida Craddock’s disinterest in marriage. She had heard about the horror her teacher Annie Shoemaker experienced during sexual intercourse. The second part shows Ida finding others who wished to learn more about women experiencing pleasure. She researches several books, attends lectures, and moves to San Francisco. The third part shows Ida focusing on summoning Soph, whom she claimed to be her spiritual husband and who brought her pleasure. She becomes active in marriage reform and the Free Love movement. The final part of the story sees Ida facing Anthony Comstock in court. She is charged with spreading obscene information through pamphlets and teaching other women about sex. Ida fights against both the Comstock Act and her mother’s insistence that she is insane.

Joan Koster’s research of the journals, newspapers, and court documents allowed for the full story of Ida Craddock’s struggle to be heard in Censored Angel. Her mother, Lizzie Craddock, was a hypocrite. She raised her daughter to believe that a husband controls everything and a woman must suffer in marriage, yet she was married to three men and owned an apothecary shop. Many of Ida’s problems were the result of Lizzie’s interference in her life. The supporting characters added to Ida’s experience. I felt Katie was the only person who understood Ida. She was supportive and never turned her back on Ida. The excerpts at the beginning of each chapter from Anthony Comstock and Ida were enlightening. The end of the book made me reflect on the amount of freedom that I experience today. Access to books, internet articles, and marriage counselors is now taken for granted. Ida personifies a time that did not allow women to be heard.

Censored Angel by Joan Koster is a fictional story revolving around a real-life, clever, and courageous young woman who defied convention to become an atypical marriage counselor, despite the deeply restrictive social and legal decrees of the Victorian era. Ida Celanire Craddock's advocacy of free love and free thought put her in a direct fight with Anthony Comstock, the Anti-Obscenity Postal Inspector. It also puts her at odds with the one person in life that we should always be able to count on for support: her own mother. Ida pushes forward, researching international literature and ultimately writing her own while providing sexual counseling to women and married couples. Repeatedly threatened, Ida's dedication is rocked but remains steadfast as the walls close in and the reality she faces of being institutionalized or forced into prison is constantly present.

Censored Angel is the second book in Joan Koster's Forgotten Women series, and I do feel like the world has indeed forgotten about Ida Celanire Craddock. I grew up in an extremely liberal family in the city of San Francisco, and I'd never heard of her. Now I have, and I am so grateful. Koster's writing is exceptionally well done, and I really liked the mystical elements that are employed. I can see how Ida would be completely ostracized for having an otherworldly partner, and Koster does not continue this injustice in the writing of her book. Ida is a fully fleshed and vibrantly written character, and her dialogue feels authentic. It is heartbreaking to see her diminished to an immoral, hypersexual deviant in the eyes of many. There is a scene where she is cruelly threatened by a man posing as a patient, and in my mind, I imagined that could be any doctor at any time in any room. Koster makes the point universal, and it is terrifyingly honest. Still, there remains good in the world, and as her next patient says, "I so admire brave women. So do I. Very highly recommended.