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A review by shanaqui
A Trace of Copper by Anne Renwick
adventurous
lighthearted
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
I was really fascinated by the idea of Anne Renwick's A Trace of Copper. Steampunk set in Wales, with a female Indian doctor main character and chasing down a mysterious disease -- sounds like it has my name on it, right? And there were things to like about it, though the infectious disease concepts are introduced in ways that feel really clunky to me. Sometimes it manages to bring across genuine concepts in epidemiology, and then sometimes they miss something blindingly obvious like starting to plot the known cases on a map. (Granted, they don't have many cases yet, but how else do they really plan to track the spread they're fully expecting to occur?)
I also cringed hard at Piyali using the names of infectious diseases to swear. Just... super pretentious. If you want me to believe this is a biologist, you don't need to have her doing something a child might do to show off what long words they've learned. At first when she exclaimed "schistosomiasis!" I thought she was making a diagnosis and the author was just laughably off-base with how schistosomiasis is contracted, what it does to the body, etc... but nope. She's just using it as an exclamation instead of "oh my goodness!" or "oh no!"
Aaand then the two main characters were too busy boning to keep their minds on the politically and epidemiologically important disease they were meant to be tracking and attempting to cure. I'll give a pass on their supposed mechanism of cure and the speed of it working (and indeed of them finding a cure), and of the fact that they totally ignored the likelihood of resistance arising if you're gonna use a monotherapy... because I expect this was written by a layperson and it's sweet that they made this much of an effort to begin with. I suspect it'd go down easier for someone who doesn't study infectious diseases, though.
I also cringed hard at Piyali using the names of infectious diseases to swear. Just... super pretentious. If you want me to believe this is a biologist, you don't need to have her doing something a child might do to show off what long words they've learned. At first when she exclaimed "schistosomiasis!" I thought she was making a diagnosis and the author was just laughably off-base with how schistosomiasis is contracted, what it does to the body, etc... but nope. She's just using it as an exclamation instead of "oh my goodness!" or "oh no!"
Aaand then the two main characters were too busy boning to keep their minds on the politically and epidemiologically important disease they were meant to be tracking and attempting to cure. I'll give a pass on their supposed mechanism of cure and the speed of it working (and indeed of them finding a cure), and of the fact that they totally ignored the likelihood of resistance arising if you're gonna use a monotherapy... because I expect this was written by a layperson and it's sweet that they made this much of an effort to begin with. I suspect it'd go down easier for someone who doesn't study infectious diseases, though.