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Loading... The Dress Lodger (Ballantine Reader's Circle)by Sheri Holman
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. What attracted me to this book was its title. A book about Cheese? i thumbed thru a few paages & found the writing was great. The introduction, where a woman gives birth to 11 babies seemed a bit much, but once the main characters appeared, Margaret, whoe husband has left her but she is still struggling to run their dairy farm the traditional way, Polly, her teen-age daughter who wants to save the farm, but discovers first love with someone completely unsuitable, & August, the only son of a family of preachers who main pleasure in life is to pose as Thomas Jefferson all of whom live in a small town just outside the political whirl of Washington DC. The story is set in the present, as another reviewer pointed out - it could hardly be more present day, and all of our hopes, pleasures & foibles are present with all their consequences, some unintended but all entertaining. (  ) MarianV | May 28, 2009 |  This book has lots going for it but the cover isn't one of them. It is ugly. This book is full of details about cows, cheese making, and small towns. It was also very prescient. I read it just when the economy started going south and diary farmers are in trouble in a big way and selling off their herds for pennies on the dollar, the Octamom had just delivered her eight babies, and their was a populist running for President. It is a story about communities and how they function as much as it is about cheese. This is a nice slow easy gentle read. The central story has well developed characters and is somewhat of a domestic drama. However, that story gets lost in lots of other subplots. The separate plot lines come together at the end but not in an obvious way. This book moves too slowly and could have benefited from some better editing to tighten up the story lines and make them more concise. It is one big messy kind of thing - just like life. (  ) benitastrnad | Mar 26, 2009 | I was thoroughly entertained by this book, a conglomeration of daily grind, humor, horror - a lot like life. It's a coming-of-age story about eighth grader Polly Marvel in love with her history teacher. It's also a coming-of-age for her mother Margaret, divorced and desperately trying to hold on to her family dairy farm. It is the story of Leland Vaughn, the local Episcopal priest, a most persuasive man who finds himself appalled by the outcomes of his persuasion. Their lives intertwine with others in their small town as everybody in the novel sees what he has given his life to and learns what is ultimately important. (  ) LizzieD | Mar 4, 2009 | strikingly aprapo as election politics permeate small town life ( ) aletheia21 | Oct 5, 2008 | fabulous thoughtful delightful charming clever book...packaging and back cover blurb all wrong ...looks like sweet charming countryside tales and its much more than that! lauraCz | Apr 7, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
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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)
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