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Reviewed by:
  • The Corpse Queen by Heather M. Herrman
  • Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor
Herrman, Heather M. The Corpse Queen. Putnam, 2021 [416p]
Trade ed. ISBN 9781984816702 $18.99
E-book ed. ISBN 9781984816719 $10.99
Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 8-12

When a long-lost aunt sends for her, seventeen-year-old Molly is happy to leave her impoverished orphanage for the wealth and luxury now offered by her new relative, but she’s also suspicious. Rightfully so, as it turns out, since Aunt Ava requests Molly’s help in her expansive grave-robbing operation, which supplies medical students in 1850s Philadelphia with fresh bodies. Molly agrees, partly because she has nowhere else to go and partly because her nighttime forays into the seedier side of town begin to turn up information about the Knifeman, who she believes killed her best friend Kitty. She’s also finding she’s got a knack for science and anatomy, and her aunt even allows her to take lessons under a well-known doctor, but soon she realizes these upper elites might be the wrong sort of company. This is a wonderfully macabre thriller that mines considerable tension and chills from the [End Page 14] grotesqueries and disturbing lack of ethics in nineteenth-century medical inquiry, leaning as much on various characters’ utter lack of compassion as on blood and guts for its horror. Molly is appealing in her complexity even if she’s not always likable; she’s as taken by new science as any clever girl would be and she’s almost willing to put aside her principles and empathy until she realizes that the doctor’s thirst for information might be getting people killed. The third-person narration is occasionally interrupted by malevolent first-person musings about an unknown tragedy, adding to the book’s intrigue. This is a winner for fans of Bray’s Diviner series or Zdrok’s Spectacle (BCCB 1/19).

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