In 1882, a woman may study chemistry. Practicing it is another matter entirely.

Twenty-two-year-old Aurelia Harding has the education, the knowledge, and the skill to follow in her father's footsteps as a chemist. What she doesn't have is his freedom. In the small Massachusetts town of Aldenwyck, Aurelia is permitted to work in the back room of Harding's General Store, preparing medicines so long as no one discovers who is really filling their prescriptions.

Then Aurelia finds a discarded notice for a pharmaceutical examination in Boston. There is nothing in the rules that says a woman cannot sit for it.

Getting there, however, will require a deception of her own.

With the help of her childhood friend Jonathan Davies, Aurelia concocts a false courtship that will give her the respectable excuse she needs to travel to Boston. But beyond Aldenwyck, she discovers a world far larger and more complicated than the one she left behind. Jonathan has secrets of his own, society's rules prove far less immovable than she was taught to believe, and a fellow chemist named Richard Sumner sees Aurelia not as an oddity, but as an equal.

Passing the examination may prove easier than deciding what to do once she returns home.

Because earning the right to call herself a chemist is one thing. Claiming the right to determine the course of her own life may cost Aurelia everything she has ever known.

Set against the social and scientific upheaval of Gilded Age Massachusetts, An Honest Remedy is a story of ambition, friendship, hidden lives, and one woman's determination to make a place for herself in a world that has already decided where she belongs.