HOT NEW RELEASE – DISTURBINGLY LOVELY – “ANATOMY: A LOVE STORY”

Welcome to another Hot New Release Review where I tell you about the “Must Read” new releases, like Violeta!

A gothic tale full of mystery and romance about a willful female surgeon, a resurrection man who sells bodies for a living, and the buried secrets they must uncover together.

Edinburgh, 1817.

Hazel Sinnett is a lady who wants to be a surgeon more than she wants to marry.

Jack Currer is a resurrection man who’s just trying to survive in a city where it’s too easy to die.

When the two of them have a chance encounter outside the Edinburgh Anatomist’s Society, Hazel thinks nothing of it at first. But after she gets kicked out of renowned surgeon Dr. Beecham’s lectures for being the wrong gender, she realizes that her new acquaintance might be more helpful than she first thought. Because Hazel has made a deal with Dr. Beecham: if she can pass the medical examination on her own, the university will allow her to enroll. Without official lessons, though, Hazel will need more than just her books – she’ll need bodies to study, corpses to dissect.

Lucky that she’s made the acquaintance of someone who digs them up for a living, then.

But Jack has his own problems: strange men have been seen skulking around cemeteries, his friends are disappearing off the streets. Hazel and Jack work together to uncover the secrets buried not just in unmarked graves, but in the very heart of Edinburgh society.

4.8 stars

Wow this was REALLY GOOD! This was so dark, compelling, and highly entertaining! Couldn’t put it down!

CW(*): Body snatching, organ trafficking, kidnapping, human experimentation, maiming, and murdering.

This book had science, the occult, romance. murder mystery… everything!

You’d like this book if you like “Lady and the Tramp” kinda romance and Dark Academia Historical Fiction with strong female characters, feminist and dark themes (pseudo-science and alchemy), paranormal/SFF elements like The Alienist, Frankenstein, Ninth House, The Diviners, and Hidden Figures.

FIRSTLY – I TOTALLY ADORED HAZEL. She’s into… books! So beautifully nerdy and passionate about medicine and science! There is something irresistible about a character so passionate about a dream that totally ignores social conventions, like Hazel. She’s determined to pursue her dream of becoming a physician even though she is expected to get married and “behave like a lady”.

More than expected she is bullied into getting married

“‘Do you know what happens to unmarried women?” Hazel knit her eyebrows together. “I suppose . . . I mean—” Lady Sinnett cut her off with a sad, rueful chuckle. “Nowhere to live. At the mercy of your relatives. At the mercy of your little brother and whomever he deems to marry. Begging your sister-in-law for scraps of human decency, praying that she’s kind’.”

 

“force women to live at the mercy of whichever man wants them but shame them for anything they might do to get a man to want them. Passivity was the ultimate virtue. Be patient, be silent, be beautiful and untouched as an orchid, and then and only then will your reward come: a bell jar to keep you safe.”

 

“I wouldn’t object to teaching the rare woman who had a mind capable for natural philosophy and the study of the body. Yes, on the whole, the female brain is smaller, more susceptible to hysterics and emotion, less inclined to reason. But there’s no reason to believe that a specimen might emerge from the female sex able enough to be taught.”

SECONDLY – Alchemy and the occult! I loved that the antagonist’s purpose was the quest for eternal life through alchemy and occult science.

THIRDLY- Dark academia! Loved all the themes around body snatching, anatomy studies with cadavers, surgical procedures and 18th century science!

“They’re trying to get the body to sell it to the doctors. The students up at the uni. They needs bodies to study on and stuff. A body goes for two guineas and a crown. If it’s pregnant, it goes for three guineas, but that’s harder, seeing as they rarely hang a woman with child.”

 

“The difference between the eighteenth-century surgeon and the physician is stark and distinct. A physician may be a gentleman of social standing and considerable means, with access to medical college and a proper education in Latin and the fine arts. It is his role to consult and advise on a matter of all ailments, internal and external, and provide whatever poultices or medicines may provide relief. A surgeon, by contrast, is more often a man of lower social status who understands that a genius in the study of anatomy may provide him a pathway to elevated rank. He must be prepared to work with the poor and deformed, the monsters unloved and made gruesome by either war or circumstance. The physician works with his mind. The surgeon works with his hands, and his brute strength.”

Then was the unorthodox romance, just the way I like romances!

And, last but not least, I loved the depiction of the times and all social commentary about classism, sexism and other social inequalities.

“Body snatchers were a vital organ of the living city itself. It was filthy, and the fancy folks liked to look away, but they were essential nonetheless. Everyone knew they were doing it; police hardly cared, so long as you didn’t take clothes or jewels from the graves. Wealthier families had iron cage mortsafes, or solid stone slabs, above the graves to protect them from people like Jack. Poorer families sometimes had someone sitting and watching, a sentinel who would stay beside the grave for three or four days, until the body decomposed enough to no longer be valuable to doctors for study. Mostly, though, it was the unloved who made Jack’s living, the bodies buried shallow and forgotten. They would be invaluable to Jack, and to the doctors he sold them to. Whatever little those poor souls did in life, they did plenty in death.”

And how Hazel used it to her advantage!.

“Being a woman had closed many doors to Hazel Sinnett, but it had also revealed to her a valuable tool in her arsenal: women were almost entirely overlooked as people, which gave her the power of invisibility. People saw women, they saw the dresses women wore on public walks through the park, and the gloved hands they rested on their dates’ elbows at the theater, but women were never threats. They were never challenges worthy of meaningful consideration. The footman might have refused entry to a beggarwoman or even a strange or foreign man, but Hazel—dressed like wealth—would be free to walk past him if she did so swiftly and feigning confidence. And so she did. Dr. Beecham was sitting”

This was my first book by this author and now looking forward to MANY more!

You would enjoy this book if you like books of these categories and topics:

(*) Content Warning

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Have you read “Anatomy: A Love Story” or any of these similar books? How did you like them? Any hot new releases you are excited about that I should add to this list? Let’s chat in the comments!

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