Author:
Rating: 2/5
17-year-old Hazel Sinnett has always been fascinated with medicine. However, early 1800s Scotland isn’t exactly the most conducive environment for a lady to become a doctor.
Spoilers ahead.
Detailed Summary
Hazel is meant to marry her cousin Bernard, a future Viscount, but she wants to become a surgeon. She sneaks into an anatomy theatre to watch a dissection with the help of a boy (later introduced as Jack Currer). Jack is a resurrection man, someone who digs up bodies and sells them to anatomists. His daytime job is at the theatre, as a guard or something. Hazel is largely ignored by her mother who constantly dotes on Percy, Hazel’s younger brother and heir to all the property. Her older brother George died of the plague and her mother hasn’t ever come out of mourning. Her father works in the army somewhere. Hazel dresses up as a boy and attends Dr. Beecham’s medicine classes. Dr. Straine, the anatomy professor/doctor, recognises her and outs Hazel. She is banned from attending any more classes because women, of course, can’t be doctors. Hazel self-learns everything and also strikes a deal with Dr. Beecham–if she can pass the physician’s examination, she will be given an apprenticeship under Dr. Beecham himself AND any woman interested in becoming a doctor will be allowed to do so. Meanwhile, there have been mysterious disappearances happening around Edinburgh. Munro, one of Jack’s friends, is one to disappear. The Roman fever also causes a lot of deaths. Hazel works with Jack to procure corpses. The two fall for each other and kiss in the graveyard. Jack shows Hazel the wortflower which his mother used to brew tea out of for ailments. Hazel turns her house into a makeshift hospital (her mother and Percy are in Bath to avoid the plague) and Hazel uses the wortflower to treat patients. Munro returns with a missing arm and reveals how he was kidnapped and his arm removed without his consent. Bernard proposes to Hazel at a public event and she accepts reluctantly. On the day of Hazel’s exam, she spies on Dr. Beecham performing an eye transplant using a street urchin (she misses the examination to watch this). He catches her and reveals Jack has been brought in too (Jack had been missing for a few days). Hazel and Jack escape using the poultice that makes people sleep against Dr. Beecham. She asks Bernard for help in alerting the authorities but he betrays them and sells Jack out instead. Jack is arrested and put on trial, the decision being to hang him. Hazel confronts Dr. Beecham and asks whether he’s immortal (rather than the grandson of the original Dr. Beecham). Dr. Beecham admits the truth and offers Hazel the immortality tonic because he thinks she can make good use of it. Hazel gives the vial to Jack before his hanging. Jack will be on the run forever and doesn’t want Hazel to live such a life because he wants her to pursue her dreams. Hazel keeps treating patients and Jack disappears. In the epilogue, Hazel gets a letter, likely from Jack, saying he still loves her.
Review
Anatomy: A Love Story is a fast-paced story about a young woman’s aspiration to become a recognised physician. I went in completely blind so I had no idea that a) this book would ACTUALLY be about a medical student(ish) and b) the story was set in Edinburgh. You would think both those points would have at least endeared this book to me but I found myself only getting cross with the characters and the flimsy way various plot threads were handled.
Let’s start with Hazel. There was a lot of potential for her character to veer off the path of the “not-like-other-girls” trope. Yet Hazel doesn’t really change all that much throughout the book. Her passion for medicine is the one oddity that she possesses and while this definitely does isolate her from everyone else, I felt Schwartz didn’t really do justice to what it meant for a woman to do medicine. I wanted to see Hazel facing obstacle after obstacle, I wanted to see more introspection and a serious questioning of whether to quit medicine or not. Also, this is totally a me-problem but I am an unhappy medical student, and by that logic, I want all other book characters who are medical students to be unhappy too. Instead, Hazel just manages to grasp all the content she needs to know to sit the examinations. She even PRACTICES FREAKING MEDICINE?!?? Like, what the hell??? I’m a fourth-year medic and I would actually cry if I was left alone with a patient to treat whatever they had. Her path to learning felt far too easy and smooth. I couldn’t stop thinking about the Edinburgh Seven while reading this book and all that Sophia Jex-Blake and her colleagues endured. I suppose when I realised this book was about a) and b) as listed above, I thought the plot was going to focus more on that. Side note: Hazel’s name also irked me tremendously. Surely that’s not a 19th-century name!
Jack Currer also had potential to be MORE. He was charming and just the kind of rapscallion readers swoon over. But he also had no depth and the romance between him and Hazel escalated from zero to one hundred in, like, three seconds. One bit about his arc really made me laugh. He buys a music box for this actress he’s crushing on and when he sees her kissing another man, the box drops and the figurine shatters. It was just SO on the nose! And while I did feel empathy for Jack, I genuinely couldn’t stop rolling my eyes (which made reading quite hard actually).
Other lines that gave me a good laugh:
There was something about Jack’s face–the way his lip curled up at its edges, his cool grey eyes that seemed endless, as if they were windows into an expanse of calm ocean that went for miles–that made her [Hazel] want to tell him things, to open up and say the things she had never said out loud.
How freaking cringe is that? I’m sorry, I can’t. Hazel, you literally met this boy last week. It was all just too insta-love-y and meh. I’m not sparing Jack from feeling that way about Hazel though. Look at this:
Jack wanted to stay. He couldn’t explain it–he wished there was a reason for him to linger, to press his body up close against Hazel’s and breathe in the metallic smell of lightning that clung to her, a peculiar smell mixed with bergamot and castile soap.
JACK, YOU BARELY KNOW THIS YOUNG LADY!!!
Also, whenever Hazel and Jack were in the same scene together, there was SO MUCH HEAD-JUMPING! I couldn’t tell whether Schwartz was going for third-person limited or omniscient because she sure did jump quite frequently between the two. I clearly remember the scene where Bernard is turning away from Hazel and Jack, and there’s a line that goes something like, “If Hazel could have seen Bernard’s eyes, she would have seen the fire behind them,” and I was just like…eh, okay.
I will say I did like the line about the hearts loving each other:
“My heart is yours, Hazel Sinnett,” Jack said. “Forever. Beating or still.”
“Beating or still,” she said.
Yes, it’s a tiny bit cringe but also in a sweet, sickly way.
The plot was also a bit of a mess. I knew from the start that Dr. Beecham was the same Beecham and that there was no grandson or anything like that (I even wrote a little comment on a post-it note about it!). Indeed, I had predicted that Beecham had something to do with the grave robbers from the get-go and had essentially scribbled down the plot of the book on that post-it. The only surprising thing to me was how Dr. Beecham gave Hazel a vial with the immortality concoction. I suppose he did genuinely want to advance medicine, he was just going about it wrong. But the whole transplant surgery thread really took away from the crux of the plot. I wanted Hazel to pass the examination. I wanted something to come out of her hard work. Instead, it all goes to waste! And then the whole Jack getting arrested but also drinking the immortality mixture felt so silly. It was a tacky ending.
I thought the epilogue would be similar to Tuck Everlasting, and Hazel would find that Jack hadn’t drunk any of the immortality stuff. But she gets a letter from him so I suppose we’ll know more about what went down in book two?
To be quite frank, the only reason I gave this book a 2/5 was that I could identify different parts of Edinburgh. Every few pages, I’d go, “Oh my god, I know where that is!” and I felt very cultured. Otherwise, not a fan of this book and I doubt I’ll be reading the sequel.