spookily's review

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dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad tense slow-paced

5.0


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overlap's review

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dark emotional informative sad fast-paced

5.0


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corriejn's review against another edition

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dark informative sad slow-paced

3.0

Historical story, worth learning about: 5/5

This written accounting of that story: ....oh, no. 

I can only imagine that the driver of this book's popularity is readers who hadn't before encountered this historical event and were just eager to learn about it, rather than readers actually finding this to be competent, let alone skilled or compelling, writing about said history.

The writing is stilted, like a decent high school report listing off a sequence of poorly-connected chronological details found through research, with just the *very* most awkward incorporation of quotes from historical sources. Very occasionally, this is interspersed by a brief sentence or two of quite flowery and sentimental prose that the author seemed wanting to include. For the most part, though, it's a dry recounting of chronological tidbits, in very dear need of a competent and assertive editor.

There are also a number of issues with how the material is presented, ranging from astonishingly incompetent to downright creepy.

For instance, the author heavily focuses on descriptions of each girl's/woman's physical attractiveness (and not just in context for describing the later effects of their illnesses). E.g., at one point there is mention of how a doctor "examined her elegant body," apropos of nothing other than said creepy fixation on describing the conventional/physical attractiveness of the young women in question.

There are also a number of instances of use of troublingly ableist language (not as a part of historical quotes, but in the author's writings), such as (hidden as spoilers in case you don't wish to view them)
describing the "crippled" women and, at another point, description of a woman who had difficulty speaking due to her injuries being "dumbly" present during a described situation.


Regarding the astonishing incompetence, the author at one point stresses how very fraudulent it was for Dr. Frederick Flinn to not actually be an M.D.-- which may be a valid thing to point out, if he'd in fact represented himself as a medical doctor/allowed such confusion to continue-- but by stating "his degree was in philosophy. He was... a fraud of frauds." LOL... what? See the first part, it's valid to point out the misrepresentation, but a **PhD** is not a "degree in philosophy" πŸ˜‚ (It took me all of 10 seconds of googling to ascertain that he had a PhD in industrial hygiene-- he WAS indeed a Dr.! Is the author genuinely unaware that PhDs exist, and that to represent them as "a degree in philosophy!" is at least a wildly fraudulent??)

The author also at one point described a man as having an "Irish temper" 😢😬

(Brb, downgrading my initial rating, because after writing all that out, it is truly baffling to me how this book ever ended up published.)

It's really a bummer, since generally when someone writes a book on a historical situation (that is very worth being told) that is popularly and well received, it kind of shuts the door to others attempting to write books on the same topic. This is a topic, however, that deserves greatly more competent handling than Moore has given it here. What a shame.

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litalia's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring sad slow-paced

3.5


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hey__sunshine's review against another edition

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emotional informative inspiring sad slow-paced

3.5


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mandi4886's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.25


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thatsssorachael's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring sad medium-paced

4.0

I didn't really know what to expect with this one. The only thing I knew about it was a girl got radium poisoning so bad her jaw fell off. Not totally true, it sort of..crumbled, and it wasn't just one girl. 

This was a lot denser than I thought it would be, and I found myself needing to slow down my reading to fully grasp all the information, names, and emotions of the story. It was absolutely fascinating and horrifying, do not skip the post script. This is a direct look at how capitalism views it's (poor, female) workers, and especially so in the 1920s. While a lot hasn't changed, at least in this day and age we get work place safety and a governing body to go to when our right to a safe workplace has been violated. That's in huge part, at least in the USA, to these women. 

Highly recommend 

TW gore, cancer, miscarriage, domestic violence

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ellyreadstoo's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative inspiring tense fast-paced

5.0


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