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Loading... The Dress Lodgerby Sheri Holman
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A historical fiction piece set in England in 1831 at the start of a cholera epidemic. The story crosses the lives of the well-to-do and the poor and looks at the class struggles and their perception of the epidemic. This story has a little of everything, prostitution, body-snatching, tenement housing, and every other social condition you can imagine during that time period. (  )sunfi | Jun 28, 2009 |   so much fun to read, unusual voice, love the dress , thank God for modern medicine (  )GCPLreader | May 2, 2009 | Dark, compelling and evocative. I couldn't put it down. (  )mstores | Oct 13, 2008 | A poor man's 'Crimson Petal and the White' (Faber). Holman states in the reader's guide at the back of the Ballantine edition that she was inspired by Dickens' 'Bleak House', but this is presumably a Dickens born in America, barely on nodding terms with London, and born over a hundred years too late. Although an interesting concept, with informative background into the 1832 cholera epidemic and the extreme poverty of a northern England town, Holman misses the mark with her dark study of nineteenth century life. The narrative is littered with anachronisms (gold lame, in the 1830s?), American phrases and colloquialisms (blocks instead of streets, charley horse instead of cramp, diapers, candy, hairdos, and even a white picket fence!); the dialogue is badly written (she should have had an English editor check over her 'bad language', as the blue-tongued landlord sounds like a five year old experimenting with naughty words!) and peppered with random attempts at local dialect; and her characters are more caricatures than vivid personalities. The second person narration suits the style and setting of the novel, but it's been better executed elsewhere, and although Holman doesn't censor the horrors of disease and prostitution, the suggestion of a happy ending for Gustine and Pink seems tacked on after nearly three hundred pages of misery and degradation. Read Michel Faber's 'Crimson Petal' instead, or indeed Dickens' 'Bleak House'. (  )AdonisGuilfoyle | Jul 12, 2008 | 4  Set in 19th-century England, The Dress Lodger shows the reader a face of England that is usually ignored by Jane Austen film adaptations. This novel isn’t about the trials and tribulations of the landed gentry, nor is it about the games women must play to land a husband and financial security. In Sheri Holman’s England, sanitation is nonexistent and the medical field is still in its infancy, so much so that doctors and surgeons had to resort to grave-robbing (directly or indirectly) to further their scant knowledge. One such surgeon, Dr. Henry Chiver, has relocated to the port city of Sunderland in the hopes of reviving a reputation damaged by his involvement in body-snatching. The few students he has taken on have no faith in him due to his inability to present bodies for their study. As he grows increasingly desperate, Henry stumbles onto Gustine, a young prostitute and the eponymous dress lodger of our story, who offers to procure bodies for him for reasons that she doesn’t immediately reveal. Of course, in a place and time where body-snatching and prostitution are commonplace, it’s only natural that Gustine’s reasons for extending help are less than altruistic. Read the full review here. ( )bastardmoon | May 30, 2008 | 1 0.044 seconds to build listing
Amazon.com (ISBN 034071784X, Paperback)The Dress Lodger is engrossing historical fiction. As in the best of its genre, Sheri Holman's atmospheric, miasmic tale set in cholera-stricken Sunderland, England, circa 1831 is based on fact. Its epigraph from Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary--"Grave: A place where the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student"--casts the novel's thematic lodestone, steering the reader into a deathly plot pursued through streets emanating the sounds, insufferable smells, humor, adversities, and disease of an early-19th-century industrial city.Fifteen-year-old Gustine--the dress lodger--is a potter's assistant by day, prostitute by night. Her overbearing pimp and landlord has her permanently shadowed by an indefatigable, mysterious old woman "called Eyeball or Evil Eye or Gray Sister by boys who have read their Homer, but mostly called just plain Eye." Otherwise how could he guard his investment in the startling blue dress in which Gustine rents herself? Her trade, he explains, "works on this basic principle: a cheap whore is given a fancy dress as a higher class of prostitute, the higher the station of the clientèlle; the higher the station, the higher the price." Gustine's garment beckons Henry Chiver, an ambitious young surgeon who has fled Edinburgh, having been implicated in the convictions of infamous pioneer anatomists Burke and Hare for murder and grave robbing. For this doctor, desperate to reestablish his tarnished reputation through medical discovery, the heart is the favorite organ, "the singular fascination of his life." But to further his researches, and quell the increasing demands of his paying students--who are restless for induction into the arts of the scalpel--Henry requires dead bodies for dissection, to the horror of his naïve, philanthropic fiancée. But the Anatomy Act, which allows doctors to obtain corpses legally, has yet to pass through Parliament, and a suspicious public is terrifying itself with stories of murderous "burkers." Street-smart Gustine, a pragmatist trapped in unrelenting poverty, is all heart for her nameless little son who wears--literally--his heart on the outside. His rare case of ectopia cordis is just the sort of anatomical anomaly whose study would make a name for the doctor. Amid the gathering momentum of the cholera epidemic, Henry and Gustine strike up a fatal pact: life for her son in exchange for a fresh supply of dead bodies for Henry's dissection. With mordant Dickensian wit and Elizabeth Gaskell's deft touch for gutsy outcast women seizing control of their destiny, Sheri Holman carves out a rich, imaginative adventure as incisive and as gruesomely fascinating as a 19th-century operating theater. --Rachel Holmes (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:08 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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