A friend loaned me this book and I dove in and read it in two days, tackling the first 13 chapters in one go: highly readable, and a breeze to get through. That said, I know that reading this book will be relegated to the pantheon of things I forgot I have read two months from now. I was quite surprised to learn it was a Goodreads nominee for Best Debut Novel and Best Historical Fiction because I wouldn’t have given it such high praise. In fact, though it takes place in a historical context I would categorize it almost as a Historical Fantasy because my suspension of disbelief was pushed to its absolute maximum in a “you have got to be kidding me” sort of way. It fell prey to a common pitfall of many debut novels: a great premise rendered lackluster due to weak storytelling and underdeveloped characters.
But the premise was SO DANG GOOD: a brokenhearted female apothecary in the 1700s dispense poisons to help women in a secret back alley apothecary? Yes, please. In other timeline, a woman in present day discovers her husband has been unfaithful and rolls solo to what would have been their 10th wedding anniversary trip to London, discovering a mysterious vial while mudlarking in the Thames, her own “Eat, Pray, Mud?” HECK YES! This has the bones of a great mystery but Penner made too many obvious and coincidental choices. In that all the choices she makes and that her characters make are the most obvious and basically everything unfolds exactly like you would like it to with very little fanfare. Everything is all wrapped up in a bow, or really, like a bouquet of neatly wrapped bows. Very tidy.
Except for the times when something so silly happens you are scoffing at it, i.e. my scoffting at “this is not how applying to graduate school works” and “people you just met aren’t going to so easily corroborate your story to the police” and “it cannot be this easy to basically trip and fall and solve a historical mystery in five days” and “wow this man cannot be this stupid, oh wait he is.”
Also, the thing that annoyed me the most at the very end? WHY DID SHE THROW THE VIAL IN THE RIVER?! Because obvious symbolism. She LET GO of the vial because she was LETTING GO OF HERSELF. Yeah, we get it.
All that said, I’m not mad about it, I had fun and got to gab with a friend about it. And sometimes, that’s what reading is about.