A gritty detective story as unflinching as its heroine, rich in well-researched period detail.
An intrepid female medical student stumbles on a conspiracy in Victorian-era Edinburgh.
Sarah Gilchrist is one of a dozen young women braving their first year of medical studies at an unnamed Edinburgh university which has grudgingly admitted them but treats them with contempt. Chaperoned in sequestered classrooms, the women are mocked by male students and professors alike, but Sarah has it worse than most. As a debutante in London’s smarter circles, Sarah was raped at a ball by the son of a lord, then blamed for the attack and banished to a sanatorium for treatment of her "promiscuity." Debut author Welsh lays it on thick in the opening chapters. Sarah’s fellow female students shun her while her repressive aunt and uncle, with whom she lives, preach at her. She rarely encounters a man who doesn't smirk at her. A defter hand would evoke the pathos of Sarah’s situation without lathering the reader in it. Eventually Sarah finds a friend, and the story finds its footing when Sarah recognizes a corpse in dissection class as a young prostitute she encountered in her work at a charitable clinic. Did the girl die by suicide, or was it murder? Sarah’s investigation takes her to the houses of ill repute and opium dens of the less savory side of Edinburgh. Now the game’s afoot! Welsh makes clever use of the conventions of the genre—Sarah has a dull, respectable suitor who the family hopes will lure her from her unsuitable pursuit of education and an irascible, brooding mentor who will reveal a secretly tender heart—while throwing in a twist informed by modern sensibilities. Damp, sooty, moralistic, and sinning Edinburgh is convincingly evoked. A coy reference at the story’s conclusion to another Scottish medical detective hints that this novel may be the first in a series.
A gritty detective story as unflinching as its heroine, rich in well-researched period detail.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-322-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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