Title: The Dress Lodger
Author: Sheri Holan
Publisher: Grove 2010
Genre: Historical Fiction
Pages: 322
Rating: 3/5 stars
Reading Challenges: TBR Pile; Popsguar - Given as a gift; Seasonal Series - Flower as bookmark
In Sunderland, England, a city quarantined by the cholera epidemic of 1831, Gustine, a defiant fifteen-year-old beauty in an elegant blue dress rented from her pimp-landlord, sells her body to feed her only love: a fragile baby boy. When she meets surgeon Henry Chiver, who has recently been implicated in the Burke and Hare killings, in which beggars were murdered so the corpses could be sold for medical research, Gustine begins working for him by securing cadavers for his ill-equipped anatomy school. It is a gruesome job that will soon threaten the very things she’s working so hard to protect.
One of those books that has been on my shelf for years it feels like. I finally dove in and it's middle of the road. It's not a bad book, but I found myself fairly bored by it. I wasn't super connected to any of the characters. The setting and background story is interesting, but not enough to carry me through the entire book. I was not a fan of the weird third person narration and jumps between stories and characters. The book felt unconnected. Overall a very meh historical fiction novel.
Next up on the TBR pile:
