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Summary: Fascinating medical historical fiction
Review: I picked up this book thinking it was a fictional account of a prostitute in England of 150 years ago. The book actually is a well-written, well-researched story of a disease that broke out at the beginning of modern medicine. The frustrations of science, the seething underworld of ignorance, the personal stories of a few are combined into what is quite a gripping book. It is not for the sqeamish, for sure, as disease is treated with the same careless facination that the society of the times felt, when disease was so much an ordinary occurance. The author conveys the simultaneous resignation and horror of this particular disease very well. It make you very glad to have been born so much later and makes you wonder what WE are doing wrong.
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Summary: Poetic and Superb Novel
Review: "The Dress Lodger" starts out with a gruesome premise. I find the idea of a doctor digging up dead bodies for dissection in the middle of the night a disgusting plot, but the writing thankfully makes you forget all that. I'm known among my friends for my weak stomach but even I enjoyed this book. Sheri Holman's writing is incredibly poetic and beautiful and it does stay very dear to your heart for a long time. Her characters are understandable but are still mysterious, she shows how everyone can be a hero and in other ways a villain. Ultimately, the book is about desperation, love, suspicion, and all other matters of the heart. I guarantee you'll get something to cherish forever out of this book.
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Summary: This is a book that CAN be judged by its cover
Review: As a mid-19th century history and costume buff, the cover of the book made me cringe...a dress unlike anything worn in the 1830s (or 1820s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, etc. etc.), but I wasn't about to let the ignorance of the graphic artist put me off what should have been a fascinating novel.How bad was it? In my opinion, Caleb Carr in his "Alienist" series does a far better job of conveying the sensibilities, science, etiquette, language, historical reference, and lanuage appropriate consistency of particular characters...so that means this book is WAY bad. I know there are 19th century precedents for bad historical writing (see Mark Twain's essay on James Fennimore Cooper's literary offenses), but that should not be an excuse today. It's not that the author didn't have any good ideas, but this is a mish-mash of period factoids: Cholera and early medical research; class conflict; gender inequality; industry and trade practices; theatre; George Washington's ancestors. I'm not saying you can't have all this in one novel; Charles Dickens did it all the time, but he did it with complex plot and character development. The author mentions somewhere in the study guide that she read a lot of books to research the subject, including some period novels. I'll grant that; the factoids had to come from somewhere, although one good desktop encylclopedia would have been just as much help here. What she really needed to do was ask some pointed questions of someone who knows something, ANYTHING, about the period. Then she needed to find an editor who could help her pull it together.
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Summary: No one mentions how funny it is
Review: Yes it is about Cholera, yes it is about a young woman prostituting herself to support her sick baby, yes it's about grave robbing. It is horrifying and sad, but also extremely funny. Now mind you it is funny like Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens. Both of these authors found the humor in the absurdity of everyday living. When I picked it up, I expected it to be miserable. I was drawn to it but expected to be relieved to have it over with. For the first time in ages, I am actually torn between wanting to neglect my child and cats in order to read this book, and wanting to lock it away somewhere so it will never be over. I intend to track down and read every word this author has ever written.
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Summary: Great concept - the implementation didn't grab me
Review: Sheri Holman had a powerful concept, an intriguing plot, and characters with lots of potential. I just wish she would have refrained from doing something too many contemporary authors do, get in the way of their own stories. I thought there were too many self-conscious effrots to be "literary." (It starts right in Chapter 1, where after a while, she wonders if she started the novel by introducing us the the worng character.) That sort of creative-writing-workshop stuff can be OK in the rioght spot, but definitely not here, when there was a story that could have been so poweerful had it not been weighed down with cute writing technique. I would have given the book 5 stars had allowed the story to shine through on its own.
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Summary: Travelogue of 1830
Review: This interesting book about life in 1830's England lacked the personal narrative to make it compelling. The use of multiple points of view made it difficult to become involved in a single person's problems. The book became an interesting viewing of the horrors of life surrounded by poverty and assaulted by plague. Unfortunately the research and understanding was not translated into characterizations that took hold of us. This book does not involve us like Girl with a Pearl Earring does in a similar historical setting. That is too bad because the author did fine work otherwise.
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Summary: Vivid descriptions but too depressing for me
Review: The author does a good job of describing the terrible conditions these poor people live in and fleshing out her characters. I simply found the subject matter too depressing. I disliked "Angela's Ashes" for the same reason.
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Summary: Portrait of a bleak and foreboding time
Review: This is never a book I would have chosen to read. It was passed over to me by my daughter's music teacher as a "good read". And it is. The writing leaves a little to be desired, but the characters and plotting suffice to carry the reader to the end. What really makes the book, in my opinion, is the time period in which it is set, and the author's obvious attention to research and accuracy in presenting a bleak and backward time in 19th Century England during the cholera epidemic. Strangely, I probably would have dismissed the story had I not read it at a time when we the possibility of biological warfare (mimicking the cholera epidemic in the novel) is very real.
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Summary: Captivating historical timepiece
Review: The Dress Lodger is a vivid description of life in fictional Sunderland, a small city in early 19th century England. A strong concoction of well-defined characters is served up, primarily Henry Chiver, physician, his fiancee, Audrey Place, and Gustine, the dress lodger (prostitute), who has a crush on him and procures corpses for his students to dissect. A gritty and uncompromising look at a society struggling toward the modern age, but bitten by plague and still entrapped in superstition, class inequality, poverty and economic woes. At times it is hard for the reader to become immersed in the mindset of some of the odder characters, yet it is a satisfying well written novel, and worth persisting with to the end.
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Summary: No Escape from Destiny
Review: 'The Dress Lodger' caught my eye while thumbing through a stack of my wife's mysteries and medical novels. The setting of Sunderland, England, noted in the dust cover, drew my attention because of a delightful weekend there with my wife's long-term pen pal and her husband. So I put it by my bedside table and read it over the next several nights. At first it is not a page turner. I was not attracted to the Dickens-like squalor of an early nineteenth century port amid the odious living conditions of the industrial revolution. Nineteenth century medicine had never been one of my strong interests and a Cholera epidemic was not something I wanted to plunge into. What's more, the author's prose often seemed stodgy and bogged down in grotesque descriptions that I found off putting. But something kept me reading and before long I was deep into the story and walking through the wretched port's East End beside its lost characters. They are the prostitute, Gustine, who earns her evening shillings in the same seductive, beyond-her-means blue dress, the hustling and unattractive Inn Keeper who provides it, the old lady who keeps it in repair and follows her everywhere, the child born with its heart outside its cavity, the idealistic young doctor relentlessly in pursuit of dead bodies for carving by his students, his upper-class do-gooder fiancee, and many others. From all this Sheri Holman weaves a tale of horror of the human condition almost beyond the imagination of those of us who lived more sheltered lives in the century just passed. The characters play out their destinies in a sordid, horrendous, despicable, shocking, appalling, and ghastly manner. Holman gives us few alluring moments but when she does the words soar and glow as a welcome speck of hope against the darkness of Sunderland's terrible time when only the epidemic's quick, random strikes could extract one from the misery within and round about. That just may be the point. Although we live in a different and ostensibly more pleasant setting than that of the Sunderland East End nearly two centuries ago, we remain bound by the destinies of our genes and our upbringing and environment, the inescapable patterns and boundaries of our lives. By the end we become sadly aware of how helpless Holman's characters are when it comes to changing their ultimate fates. Are we not all likewise encumbered?
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