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Loading... The Dress Lodger (1998)by Sheri Holman
 JG_IntrovertedReader | Apr 3, 2013 |  Gustine is a high class prostitute with a baby with an ectopic heart. Henry is a body snatching physician with an obsession with hearts. Thus an unlikely partnership springs up in the midst of a cholera epidemic. As time goes on, Henry descends into madness while Gustine breaks free of her prison. Over all, the author has made the good characters with some bad qualities, the bad characters with some good qualities and the result is that there is no one to root for except the cholera, which I hoped would get them all. The book is also told in a strange way, especially the beginning - it's somewhere between third person and first person. While some might think it clever, I thought it tired and gimmicky. That being said, there was some nice quotage, so I gave her an addition star for that. (  ) elleceetee | Apr 1, 2013 | Although the story in itself isn't bad, it fails to impress me completely. It oozes grime and filth we find difficult to imagine, but sometimes it seems that is all the book is about. Dr. Chiver sometimes feels like a side character while he isn't supposed to be. The 'us' voice Holman uses is unreal and confusing, it is way too etheric for a story that is so utterly down to earth. In short: it had every element to be a book I could have loved, but it didn't deliver. ( ) Moriquen | Jul 19, 2012 | not worth the time. (  ) lindahallmann | Jun 16, 2012 | The story line was good, if gory, but the weird narrator that intruded at times really got on my nerves. I won't read this author again. (  ) MarthaJeanne | Feb 26, 2012 | 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 Wed, 02 Jan 2013 18:09:59 -0500)
In a novel set in London during the Industrial Revolution, a prostitute borrows a blue dress to attract a higher class of client and is shadowed through the streets by an evil old woman hired by the dress' owner to keep an eye on her.
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I tend to be a character-driven reader, and I found that I didn’t really like any of the characters in this book. There were probably one or two that I could have liked, Gustine being one, but that didn’t really seem to be what the author was going for.
I think Holman was trying to paint a picture of what life would have been like for the lower classes in that time frame in England, and she truly succeeded with that. She put me inside the story, and I read her well-written, picture-perfect descriptions of the working conditions, living conditions, ignorance, fear, hostility, brutality, and just general misery that described the lives of the working poor of this town and shuddered in revulsion and felt a little lot more grateful for what I have, where I live and when I live.
She also succeeded in turning my expectations for the novel and where my sympathies would lie upside-down. I have a bachelor’s degree in biology and work in a hospital: I should have been rooting for Dr. Chiver and the triumph of science all the way through. But slowly, insidiously, I found myself being led in another direction without really even realizing it. Let’s just say that I have a greater appreciation for what earlier scientists were up against, and the cost their discoveries exacted, both from some of them personally and from society. Related to that, I’ll say that I loved her choice of narrator.
I didn’t love this, but I do feel like I learned something from it. The descriptions of life for the lower classes in England in Victorian times alone made this a worthwhile read. I just don’t really think it’s a book to fall in love with, but it is a novel to make you look at your life with new eyes. (