March 28, 2021
This concept needs to be confiscated from Sarah Penner immediately and given to literally any other writer.
Between 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. To say it was a letdown is a massive understatement.
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. 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 down for either of those.
What I got was The Davinci Code: For Her.
With an inexplicable dash of Julie & Julia.
The story goes back and forth between 3 POV characters. 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. Caroline is a present-day character who finds a vial on the bank of the Thames that came from Nella’s apothecary.
Caroline has just gone to London without her husband because she found out he was cheating on her. 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.
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). 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out that ~she’s not like other girls~ because while everyone else went to coffee shops in college, she poured over ~historical documents ~ and read ~novels from the 1800s~. Things no other college student has ever done.
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. 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.� (Page 17) (Yes, somehow, we are not even 20 pages in).
The first person makes that attitude especially insufferable. She then gets married to James, a man who seems hell bent on making her feel dumb. Great start. Shocked he cheated.
Anyway, after college, Caroline seems to be angry that reading books and ~historical documents~ didn’t immediately get her a job. A twist no one saw coming. She almost applies to Cambridge but then doesn’t because she marries James the Jackass—and we all know that you can either have a degree or a husband. She chooses husband and her husband wants to stay in the states. Little known fact I learned from this book, literally no university in the states offers a master’s degree. They only count if they’re from Cambridge. Oxford isn’t mentioned so unclear if their masters� degrees count for anything.
Here’s where Caroline completely lost me: she kinda takes her anger about not being handed a job because she likes books out on� **checks notes** the books? Here’s a direct quote: “…thinking only briefly of the boxes still in our basement, packed away with the dozens of books I’d adored in school. Northanger Abbey, Rebecca, Mrs.Dalloway. What good had they done me?�
She swears off books for good and gets a clerk job at her family’s farm. I have a lot of questions about that, but the novel answers none of them. She finally gets a job doing admin work for the family farm apparently unaware that you can still read books if you have a day job.
Then she becomes obsessed with getting pregnant. We have not yet hit page 30.
Spoilers beyond this point! (I highly recommend you don’t waste your time on this novel, but if you still think you might read it and care about spoilers this is a good place to stop).
Here’s a quick rundown of the female characters in this book:
Nella: Wishes she was pregnant.
Caroline: Wished she was pregnant, spends majority of book thinking she is pregnant.
Lady Clarence: Wants to murder her husband’s lover so she can get pregnant.
Eliza: Is 12 and thankfully is not pregnant but she does think her period is a ghost which I think deserves an honorable mention.
Gaynor: Is actually a historian and is, of course, exempt from pregnancy and thoughts thereof.
Yikes.
I would be willing to roll with this if it wasn’t such a high percentage of female characters and if it was examined or dealt with in any kind of thoughtful way. It is not. In fact, the desire to be pregnant/ have a child pops up in the weirdest ways at the weirdest times. Caroline by far wins most bizarre. Her husband is puking blood and the EMTs are telling her she should probably get rid of the stuff her husband ingested, especially if there are kids around. She then is upset that she doesn’t have a kid to potentially get poisoned / witness their father get carried away on a stretcher.
Which brings me to another weird-ass plot point. James is so upset that Caroline is mad at him for having an affair he willingly drinks just a little bit of toxic Eucalyptus oil to�**checks notes again** get her to stop being mad at him via medical emergency. Because nothing says “honey, let’s get back together� like puking blood in a hotel room in foreign country.
And then there’s Caroline’s discovery of the apothecary. This is where we get The Davinci Code: For Her. She finds the vial. Then she miraculously finds the apothecary. There’s just been this door in the middle of urban London that somehow no one else has seen since 1790. No one tore it down to build luxury flats! The Nazis bombed around it! Everyone who lives on that alley just kind of pretends it’s not there! She finds it in about two minutes. She finds all these documents inside from 1791, touches them with her bare hands, messes up one of them and then ultimately just takes cellphone pics and leaves them all there. She then tells Gaynor, her buddy at the British Library all about it and Gaynor thinks it’s interesting but sees no need to go get the documents out of the forgotten cellar thing. Historians and librarians are both known for being super chill about old documents being exposed to the elements, so this makes sense.
Caroline then reads the pictures of the documents and reads some articles Gaynor the Historian found for her. She’s shocked to find out that they match up perfectly and she’s able to jump to all sorts of conclusions without so much as an additional Google search. Incredible research skills. All that time she spent not at coffee shops clearly paid off.
You may be wondering what’s going on in the 1790s, apothecary of poisons part of the novel. You know, the part that sounded interesting. Well, it was somehow really boring despite there being two murders and a police chase. Oh, at one point the 12-year-old throws herself off of Blackfriars Bridge but she survives impact and icy water because she� **checks notes a third time** drank a tincture that made her really warm�
At the end the police are pretty sure Nella is the poisoner they’re after, but ultimately let her go because they decide in the middle of the street, after the chase, that they don’t have enough evidence to arrest a low-ish class woman. So that’s nice of them. Really feels authentic for 1791.
At the end of the book Caroline does dump James & the Giant Jackass, but possibly only temporarily. There’s an implication that after some time apart and after Caroline finishes her masters� degree in Cambridge they could get back together. It’s left open-ended. I don’t have a joke here, I just hate that.
Caroline does submit an application to Cambridge. I guess she forgave the books for not getting her a job after all. It’ll be tough to get in of course. Especially because that’s literally the only school where you can get a Master’s.
She talks to Gaynor The Actual Professional Researcher about how she wants to write a dissertation about the apothecary. Guess what Caroline is getting a degree in? If you guessed History you are entirely too logical for this novel. No, she’s getting a degree in English literature specifically she’s applied for a program that covers �18th century and Romanticism� You may notice that’s two centuries and two very different periods of literature jammed together, but at this point who’s counting.
This book ends all too soon. We are robbed of the Cambridge professor’s reaction when she tells them her dissertation will be—not on a work of literature—but a ledger she found in a mysterious basement. Would love to be a fly on the wall for that one.
In short, my sanity has suffered. 0/10 do not recommend.
Between 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. To say it was a letdown is a massive understatement.
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. 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 down for either of those.
What I got was The Davinci Code: For Her.
With an inexplicable dash of Julie & Julia.
The story goes back and forth between 3 POV characters. 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. Caroline is a present-day character who finds a vial on the bank of the Thames that came from Nella’s apothecary.
Caroline has just gone to London without her husband because she found out he was cheating on her. 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.
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). 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~. Things no other college student has ever done.
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. 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.� (Page 17) (Yes, somehow, we are not even 20 pages in).
The first person makes that attitude especially insufferable. She then gets married to James, a man who seems hell bent on making her feel dumb. Great start. Shocked he cheated.
Anyway, after college, Caroline seems to be angry that reading books and ~historical documents~ didn’t immediately get her a job. A twist no one saw coming. She almost applies to Cambridge but then doesn’t because she marries James the Jackass—and we all know that you can either have a degree or a husband. She chooses husband and her husband wants to stay in the states. Little known fact I learned from this book, literally no university in the states offers a master’s degree. They only count if they’re from Cambridge. Oxford isn’t mentioned so unclear if their masters� degrees count for anything.
Here’s where Caroline completely lost me: she kinda takes her anger about not being handed a job because she likes books out on� **checks notes** the books? Here’s a direct quote: “…thinking only briefly of the boxes still in our basement, packed away with the dozens of books I’d adored in school. Northanger Abbey, Rebecca, Mrs.Dalloway. What good had they done me?�
She swears off books for good and gets a clerk job at her family’s farm. I have a lot of questions about that, but the novel answers none of them. She finally gets a job doing admin work for the family farm apparently unaware that you can still read books if you have a day job.
Then she becomes obsessed with getting pregnant. We have not yet hit page 30.
Spoilers beyond this point! (I highly recommend you don’t waste your time on this novel, but if you still think you might read it and care about spoilers this is a good place to stop).
Here’s a quick rundown of the female characters in this book:
Nella: Wishes she was pregnant.
Caroline: Wished she was pregnant, spends majority of book thinking she is pregnant.
Lady Clarence: Wants to murder her husband’s lover so she can get pregnant.
Eliza: Is 12 and thankfully is not pregnant but she does think her period is a ghost which I think deserves an honorable mention.
Gaynor: Is actually a historian and is, of course, exempt from pregnancy and thoughts thereof.
Yikes.
I would be willing to roll with this if it wasn’t such a high percentage of female characters and if it was examined or dealt with in any kind of thoughtful way. It is not. In fact, the desire to be pregnant/ have a child pops up in the weirdest ways at the weirdest times. Caroline by far wins most bizarre. Her husband is puking blood and the EMTs are telling her she should probably get rid of the stuff her husband ingested, especially if there are kids around. She then is upset that she doesn’t have a kid to potentially get poisoned / witness their father get carried away on a stretcher.
Which brings me to another weird-ass plot point. James is so upset that Caroline is mad at him for having an affair he willingly drinks just a little bit of toxic Eucalyptus oil to�**checks notes again** get her to stop being mad at him via medical emergency. Because nothing says “honey, let’s get back together� like puking blood in a hotel room in foreign country.
And then there’s Caroline’s discovery of the apothecary. This is where we get The Davinci Code: For Her. She finds the vial. Then she miraculously finds the apothecary. There’s just been this door in the middle of urban London that somehow no one else has seen since 1790. No one tore it down to build luxury flats! The Nazis bombed around it! Everyone who lives on that alley just kind of pretends it’s not there! She finds it in about two minutes. She finds all these documents inside from 1791, touches them with her bare hands, messes up one of them and then ultimately just takes cellphone pics and leaves them all there. She then tells Gaynor, her buddy at the British Library all about it and Gaynor thinks it’s interesting but sees no need to go get the documents out of the forgotten cellar thing. Historians and librarians are both known for being super chill about old documents being exposed to the elements, so this makes sense.
Caroline then reads the pictures of the documents and reads some articles Gaynor the Historian found for her. She’s shocked to find out that they match up perfectly and she’s able to jump to all sorts of conclusions without so much as an additional Google search. Incredible research skills. All that time she spent not at coffee shops clearly paid off.
You may be wondering what’s going on in the 1790s, apothecary of poisons part of the novel. You know, the part that sounded interesting. Well, it was somehow really boring despite there being two murders and a police chase. Oh, at one point the 12-year-old throws herself off of Blackfriars Bridge but she survives impact and icy water because she� **checks notes a third time** drank a tincture that made her really warm�
At the end the police are pretty sure Nella is the poisoner they’re after, but ultimately let her go because they decide in the middle of the street, after the chase, that they don’t have enough evidence to arrest a low-ish class woman. So that’s nice of them. Really feels authentic for 1791.
At the end of the book Caroline does dump James & the Giant Jackass, but possibly only temporarily. There’s an implication that after some time apart and after Caroline finishes her masters� degree in Cambridge they could get back together. It’s left open-ended. I don’t have a joke here, I just hate that.
Caroline does submit an application to Cambridge. I guess she forgave the books for not getting her a job after all. It’ll be tough to get in of course. Especially because that’s literally the only school where you can get a Master’s.
She talks to Gaynor The Actual Professional Researcher about how she wants to write a dissertation about the apothecary. Guess what Caroline is getting a degree in? If you guessed History you are entirely too logical for this novel. No, she’s getting a degree in English literature specifically she’s applied for a program that covers �18th century and Romanticism� You may notice that’s two centuries and two very different periods of literature jammed together, but at this point who’s counting.
This book ends all too soon. We are robbed of the Cambridge professor’s reaction when she tells them her dissertation will be—not on a work of literature—but a ledger she found in a mysterious basement. Would love to be a fly on the wall for that one.
In short, my sanity has suffered. 0/10 do not recommend.
