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A review by sinceremercy
The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch
1.0
The more I read of this book, the more I disliked it. The very first chapter is the best one in the story, it remains tolerable for some time, but towards the end I was dreading reading it.
For me the most irritating thing was the way the medicine was treated. A great deal of the novel is actually about and features historical medicine; one of the main characters is a physician, another is a healer without official training. This would be great, except that it's handled extremely badly. I lost count of the times someone got hit on the head and knocked unconscious for an extended period of time only to wake up later with no real negative consequences. Seriously, it happens probably a dozen different times. In one egregious example, the title character appears to suffer a serious concussion, has been unconscious for a whole day, and has some memory loss, but not long later she's back to her sharp, quick-thinking self and performing great athletic feats.
The physician, Simon, just so happens to repudiate humoral theory, he's anti-bloodletting and purging (and calls his father a hack for practicing them), and complains about learning Greek medicine because it's so old and outdated. Basically, instead of actually engaging with historical practice and innovation, the author has presented Simon as someone who just so happens to have roughly the same beliefs as a modern person might have about what is and is not proper medical theory. It's boring and irritating.
The novel is anachronistic in many other ways which sucks as a person who is interested in historical fiction for the history part as much as anything else. I wasn't a big fan of the prose but I'm not sure how much of that is the translation and how much is the original. The characters are flat and boring. Moments of high drama are undercut by the main characters suffering no permanent negative consequences ever.
The illustrations (in the ebook) were fun though.
For me the most irritating thing was the way the medicine was treated. A great deal of the novel is actually about and features historical medicine; one of the main characters is a physician, another is a healer without official training. This would be great, except that it's handled extremely badly. I lost count of the times someone got hit on the head and knocked unconscious for an extended period of time only to wake up later with no real negative consequences. Seriously, it happens probably a dozen different times. In one egregious example, the title character appears to suffer a serious concussion, has been unconscious for a whole day, and has some memory loss, but not long later she's back to her sharp, quick-thinking self and performing great athletic feats.
The physician, Simon, just so happens to repudiate humoral theory, he's anti-bloodletting and purging (and calls his father a hack for practicing them), and complains about learning Greek medicine because it's so old and outdated. Basically, instead of actually engaging with historical practice and innovation, the author has presented Simon as someone who just so happens to have roughly the same beliefs as a modern person might have about what is and is not proper medical theory. It's boring and irritating.
The novel is anachronistic in many other ways which sucks as a person who is interested in historical fiction for the history part as much as anything else. I wasn't a big fan of the prose but I'm not sure how much of that is the translation and how much is the original. The characters are flat and boring. Moments of high drama are undercut by the main characters suffering no permanent negative consequences ever.
The illustrations (in the ebook) were fun though.