The Stats
📖 BOOK REVIEW⠀📚
BOOK: The Lost Apothecary
AUTHOR: Sarah Penner @sarah_penner_author
Publisher: Park Row
Stars: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4.5)
Published: March 2, 2021
The Review
✨ The Title/Cover Draw:
- Gorgeous cover! Plus the plot sounded so interesting. Had to get this one from BOTM.
💜 What I liked:
- The way the story unravels from the present to the past, tying the two stories together. Caroline, in the present, finds a blue vial with a bear emblem. She researches who it belongs to and finds herself in some situations that change her life.
😱 What I didn’t like:
- The only reason I knocked it down half a star was because there was quite a bit of musing by the main character. I felt like even the tiniest bit of new info would cause the POV character to starting thinking for a few pages.
💁♀️ The Characters:
- Nella and Eliza in the past describe the events leading up to the blue vial. Caroline and Gaynor in the present find clues of the mystery.
🚦 The Ending:
- I audibly gasped at a few things. It was a good ending.
💭 Consider if you like:
- Mysterious with a historical setting.
All thoughts and opinions are my own.
📘 Summary:
A female apothecary secretly dispenses poisons to liberate women from the men who have wronged them—setting three lives across centuries on a dangerous collision course.
Rule #1: The poison must never be used to harm another woman.
Rule #2: The names of the murderer and her victim must be recorded in the apothecary’s register.
One cold February evening in 1791, at the back of a dark London alley in a hidden apothecary shop, Nella awaits her newest customer. Once a respected healer, Nella now uses her knowledge for a darker purpose—selling well-disguised poisons to desperate women who would kill to be free of the men in their lives. But when her new patron turns out to be a precocious twelve-year-old named Eliza Fanning, an unexpected friendship sets in motion a string of events that jeopardizes Nella’s world and threatens to expose the many women whose names are written in her register.
In present-day London, aspiring historian Caroline Parcewell spends her tenth wedding anniversary alone, reeling from the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. When she finds an old apothecary vial near the river Thames, she can’t resist investigating, only to realize she’s found a link to the unsolved “apothecary murders” that haunted London over two centuries ago. As she deepens her search, Caroline’s life collides with Nella’s and Eliza’s in a stunning twist of fate—and not everyone will survive.