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hopegirl0727 's review for:
Wildthorn
by Jane Eagland
Louisa Cosgrove is unexpectedly thrown into an insane asylum. She is told that her name is Lucy Childs and that she is very sick. Quickly, things go from bad to worse as she begins to realize that no one is coming for her and she must rely on her own wits to escape from her horrifying and traumatic prison.
This book is engaging and written in a fast-paced narrative bouncing back and forth between flashbacks and present stream-of-consciousness style sections. There have been many times when I have thought that I might have enjoyed living in in the 19th century, but now I'm realizing that I probably would have been put in an insane asylum for one of many reasons. Being depressed could get you put away, and I've certainly been depressed a few times in my life. In this situation, Louisa wants to become a doctor. Because it is unseemly for a woman to "ape a man," read books of a scientific nature, and aspire to something other than being a wife and mother, she is locked away.
Insane asylums were genuinely awful places where innocent, afflicted people, both with actual mental illnesses and not, were routinely tortured and neglected. Often, families would send their problem relatives there. Other times, families couldn't deal with a relative who had a mental illness, and they would be sent to the asylum and promptly forgotten. Most of the time, the people who went there sane quickly went insane, and almost all inmates died there and never recovered. The cemeteries of asylums were commonly used as foraging grounds for young medical students and other health professionals who needed cadavers to help them in their studies, because no one cared enough to protect the cemeteries from such thievery. They were horrible places. They were prisons.
This book taps into that theme, but it does so much more than that. It takes a very feminist stance on learning and independence, and it has an undercurrent of LGBT themes as well. On top of that, it was well-written and enjoyable. I'd definitely recommend it.
This book is engaging and written in a fast-paced narrative bouncing back and forth between flashbacks and present stream-of-consciousness style sections. There have been many times when I have thought that I might have enjoyed living in in the 19th century, but now I'm realizing that I probably would have been put in an insane asylum for one of many reasons. Being depressed could get you put away, and I've certainly been depressed a few times in my life. In this situation, Louisa wants to become a doctor. Because it is unseemly for a woman to "ape a man," read books of a scientific nature, and aspire to something other than being a wife and mother, she is locked away.
Insane asylums were genuinely awful places where innocent, afflicted people, both with actual mental illnesses and not, were routinely tortured and neglected. Often, families would send their problem relatives there. Other times, families couldn't deal with a relative who had a mental illness, and they would be sent to the asylum and promptly forgotten. Most of the time, the people who went there sane quickly went insane, and almost all inmates died there and never recovered. The cemeteries of asylums were commonly used as foraging grounds for young medical students and other health professionals who needed cadavers to help them in their studies, because no one cared enough to protect the cemeteries from such thievery. They were horrible places. They were prisons.
This book taps into that theme, but it does so much more than that. It takes a very feminist stance on learning and independence, and it has an undercurrent of LGBT themes as well. On top of that, it was well-written and enjoyable. I'd definitely recommend it.