Reviews with content warning for Animal cruelty - The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black

Reviews tagging 'Animal cruelty'

The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black by E.B. Hudspeth

20 reviews

astareads's review

dark informative sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

Edit. Turns out this was marketed in a very misleading way and is in fact not based on truth, which is kind of a bummer to find out and VERY confusing. Dropped a star thanks to that. The review below was written before I looked into it a bit further.

//

I was not expecting this to be a true story when I picked the book up, and finding out it was peaked my interest. The story of Dr. Spencer Black IS interesting, but more than that it's sad. There's clear trauma in his life

that he passes on to his family

, and that makes him more and more delusional through his life, despite his intellect and skill as a surgeon. There is not a lot of details about his life, although his journal entries and letters adds a lot to the overall image, and I think mixing the facts with fiction would've made this a more interesting read (and let me pretend the more upsetting parts were part of the fiction), but I understand why the author wanted to stick to the true story.

The second part of the book, that showed the details of Dr. Black's work, was all the more intriguing after reading about his life. It made me wonder about how he had convinced himself that creatures such as Ganesh, a goat/lion/snake hybrid or a minotaur had once been real, even though he wondered himself how such creatures would've survived.

One thing is for sure, though: dragons ARE real. A doctor said so.

Content Warnings