The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner

 The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner was this month's book club pick. It kind of got sold to us as vengeful female apothecary goes around killing men and it turns out that everyone got on board that train really quickly.

What we have here is a historical mystery.  The book alternates timelines from late 1700s London, where we follow an apothecary who secretly sells poisons to wronged women, to present day London, where we follow an amateur historian who stumbles upon one of the apothecary's bottles and begins unraveling the historical whodunit.

In general, this book was an easy read (short chapters! it makes it feel like you're really making progress, doesn't it?). I thought it was interesting and I always wanted to know what was coming next. The part of the book that appealed to me the most was the idea that women were frequently erased from the past.  Their names were subsumed by their husbands' names, if they were ever written down at all. The apothecary kept a ledger of the women she helped and for many of those women, it was all anyone would ever know about them.  I feel this a visceral way.  

(There's a running theme on the historical episodes of Let's Go to Court when Kristin, one of the hosts, works really hard to find the first names of women involved in the cases and sometimes she just can't find it and you can tell it really bums her out. It bums me out, too.)

Reactions were quite mixed at book club.  One of the members, a research librarian who was in graduate school for a doctorate in history at one point in her life, was pretty horrified at how unrealistic the whole thing was. I, for my part, as another academic, was not bothered by this. It was not based on a true story, after all.  The non-academics in the room (or garage, at it may be - the Covid numbers in our county are basically the same as they were last year at this time, pre-vaccine, and our friend has a huge, well-lit garage with a heater in it, so we were able to stay warm and stay outside!) were very puzzled by her extreme reaction. I was a bit puzzled, too, to be honest.  

I think we all sort of agreed that there were some loose ends at the end of the book, but it was an easy read and sort of interesting. We also learned about mudlarking, which is when people walk along the Thames, scavenging for items from the past.  I think there was sort of a unanimous idea that a field to London to mudlark would be something we were all interested in.  Ha!