Thanks to Netgalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review.
I did the thing where the beautiful cover lured me in, but this time it wasn’t a disaster! In fact, the book mostly earns it! I was *thisclose* to giving Anatomy: A Love Story five stars, in fact, until the ending. YMMV on this ending, seriously. What happened is something that I have read in YA historical fiction books before, and it bothered me there as well, and didn’t bother others. I will do a spoiler tagged section below if you are curious.
Basically, 90% of this book was five-star worthy for me, and 10% I am ambivalent about. There is going to be a sequel and I will read it, so maybe by then or after I will be less ambivalent. I am also extremely curious to see what future readers will think as well.
Okay, blathering over. The main things to know about this book is that you can 100% tell it’s a book written by Dana Schwartz about things that really interest her. In this case: the history of surgery, body snatching, Edinburgh, class differences, gothic vibes, murder, and smooching. The level of historical detail, and other kinds of detail she includes, is extremely impressive, to the point that for large sections of this book, it did not read at all like YA.
Our main character is Hazel Sinnett, a young lady of the noble class who has been betrothed to her cousin, soon to be a viscount, since she was a baby. But Hazel, who spent her childhood reading her father’s anatomy books, does not want to marry, she wants to be a surgeon. After witnessing (an impressively gory) surgical demonstration by world famous surgeon Dr. Beecham in which he enthusiastically lops a guy’s leg off with a bone saw, she decides to take classes to qualify as a doctor, and dresses up as a boy to do it. She is found out before she can get any practical training, and ends up making a wager with Beecham, that if she passes the qualifying exam without any training, he will take her on as his apprentice and allow women into his classes going forward. But how is she to get practical experience with human anatomy? Enter Jack Currer, Resurrection Man, digger up of and purveyor of bodies.
There was so much in this book that I loved, including Hazel, who loves her chosen field with all of her being, but there were so many small details in there that were just glorious, especially if you like things more on the macabre end of the spectrum. There is one scene early in the book where Hazel witnesses a surgeon extracting a tooth from a poor man, and immediately implanting into the mouth of a rich man, and the rich man pays the poor one for his tooth, while the poor man sits there crying and bleeding. This was a real thing that happened! There is also a strange plague they call the Roman Fever ravaging Edinburgh, though the author wrote the first draft before the pandemic started, and Hazel accidentally falls into running a free clinic for the city’s poor. The mixture of determination, fear, and curiosity in Hazel’s personality made me want all the best for her at all times.
This is not really a romance, though there is smooching in it, but it is a love story, and I think it’s pretty easy to tell that the main love story here is between Hazel and her chosen profession. She doesn’t even start her body-snatching scheme with Jack until halfway through the novel, but her quest to become a surgeon is well under way by 25% in.
And now, the thing. SPOILERS So, I really do not like it when speculative or fantasy elements intrude on otherwise perfectly realistic stories. This book is so fact-based, and so science-based, and has such a feel of lived-in history about it, that when you find out that Dr. Beecham has not only created some fantastical serum that not only makes it possible to transplant organs without the aid of anti-rejection drugs, but that he has also discovered the secret of immortality, and has been posing as his own son, and then grandson, in order to keep going in his career, it feels completely out of left field. It doesn’t fit. It’s also the climax of the mystery plot, as well as Hazel’s arc to get her license, both because Dr. Beecham is the one holding the fate of her career in his hands, but also because the author makes her have to choose between taking the exam (she doesn’t! ughhhh) and unraveling Dr. Beecham’s elaborate organ stealing scheme.
In interviews, the author does note that she was careful to place ahistorical details throughout the book to clue people in that this was a different universe than ours, but they’re such little details that only the biggest history nerd is going to notice them. And even if they were noticed, the mundanity of the changes (i.e. anesthesia being invented twenty years early) in now way forecast a fantastical element as intense as immortality. I maybe could have lived with the organ transplanting serum, but the immortality took it so far across the line that I couldn’t help feeling dissatisfied and unhappy while listening to the rest of the book END SPOILERS.
I did the audio for this one, and it was fantastic. There are dual narrators, Mhairi Morrison for the majority of the main narrative, and Tim Campbell for the clips from newspapers and medical journals set between chapters. The Scottish vibes were impeccable.
Again, will be very interested to see what other people have to say about this book. I hope many of you give it a try.