★★★
Mixing a better historical fiction with a mediocre present will, inevitably, prove to be disastrous
I don’t want to hate this book because I absolutely loved about 2/3rds of it. The premise, as I saw it, was about a pharmacist-turned-poisoner who used her healing arts to unheal the shit out of abusive, negligent, adulterous men in a time when women had so little power. And for some reason a 21st century story about a woman jilted by her husband was shoehorned in there that provided no context.
The modern-day woman, Caroline, flies off to London to take her 10-year wedding anniversary alone, since she caught her husband cheating. She discovers a little bottle with a bear stamp on it and starts investigating it, discovering everything she can about this little apothecary. Except everything she discovers is revealed in the preceding chapters, the chapters told from the point of view of both Nella (the apothecarian) and Eliza (a tween handmaid-turned-accomplice) in the 1790s.
Caroline didn’t function as a framing device. She provided nothing new to the story, and any tension or suspense was already undermined by Nella or Eliza’s more compelling narrative. We’re just reading her summarize what we just read since Caroline never researched or revealed anything that was further than a chapter or two back.
And you’d think, after hearing about Nella and Eliza going around amurderin’, we’d see Caroline perhaps just do that. Maybe her story would get interesting, and she’ll poison her husband. No, he poisons himself on accident because he’s an idiot. All her research on the apothecary just makes her look suspicious for a chapter or two. That’s it, that’s the total sum of Eliza and Nella’s story as far as it relates to Caroline.
It’s hard for me to love Nella and Eliza’s story as a result. I even prefer their denouement, this absurdly, cloyingly sweet happy ending of theirs that would’ve been painful by itself, but compared to Caroline’s entire story arc? Yeah. I’d take that any day.
