She then gets married to James, a man who seems hell bent on making her feel dumb. The first person makes that attitude especially insufferable. I couldn’t attribute my unconventional interests to anything specific, I only knew that classroom debates about civil revolution and power-hungry world leaders left me yawning.” () (Yes, somehow, we are not even 20 pages in). If you think I’m kidding here’s the actual line: “I could lose myself for hours in these seemingly meaningless documents, while my classmates met at coffee shops to study. Things no other college student has ever done.

Right away we find out that ~she’s not like other girls~ because while everyone else went to coffee shops in college, she poured over ~historical documents ~ and read ~novels from the 1800s~. She just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and many of her actions defy any kind of human logic (same is true of her husband, I’ll get to that in a minute). The book did a really good job of making me think her husband sucked right away-but it did an even better job of convincing me that Caroline sucked. Caroline is a present-day character who finds a vial on the bank of the Thames that came from Nella’s apothecary.Ĭaroline has just gone to London without her husband because she found out he was cheating on her. There’s Nella, the apothecary owner who poisons people, Eliza the twelve-year-old girl who’s a little too chill about poisoning a guy, (so far so good), and then there’s Caroline. The story goes back and forth between 3 POV characters.

With an inexplicable dash of Julie & Julia.

What I got was The Davinci Code: For Her. I was expecting a deep dive into this woman’s character that would either be thrillerish or a more lighthearted caper-style romp. I was expecting a sort of “How’d she get away with it” revenge narrative about a woman who has been pushed to the brink by the cruelty of men and good-old-fashioned 1790s misogyny. To say it was a letdown is a massive understatement.

This concept needs to be confiscated from Sarah Penner immediately and given to literally any other writer.īetween the lovely cover, the book of the month club endorsement and the promise of a Georgian female serial killer working on behalf of wronged women, I was so excited for this book.

Sarah penner the lost apothecary