The Dress Lodger is engrossing historical fiction. As in the best of its genre, Sheri Holman's atmospheric, miasmic tale set in cholera-stricken Sunderland, England, circa 1831 is based on fact. Its epigraph from Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary--"Grave: A place where the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student"--casts the novel's thematic lodestone, steering the reader into a deathly plot pursued through streets emanating the sounds, insufferable smells, humor, adversities, and disease of an early-19th-century industrial city.

Fifteen-year-old Gustine--the dress lodger--is a potter's assistant by day, prostitute by night. Her overbearing pimp and landlord has her permanently shadowed by an indefatigable, mysterious old woman "called Eyeball or Evil Eye or Gray Sister by boys who have read their Homer, but mostly called just plain Eye." Otherwise how could he guard his investment in the startling blue dress in which Gustine rents herself? Her trade, he explains, "works on this basic principle: a cheap whore is given a fancy dress as a higher class of prostitute, the higher the station of the clientèlle; the higher the station, the higher the price." Gustine's garment beckons Henry Chiver, an ambitious young surgeon who has fled Edinburgh, having been implicated in the convictions of infamous pioneer anatomists Burke and Hare for murder and grave robbing. For this doctor, desperate to reestablish his tarnished reputation through medical discovery, the heart is the favorite organ, "the singular fascination of his life." But to further his researches, and quell the increasing demands of his paying students--who are restless for induction into the arts of the scalpel--Henry requires dead bodies for dissection, to the horror of his naïve, philanthropic fiancée. But the Anatomy Act, which allows doctors to obtain corpses legally, has yet to pass through Parliament, and a suspicious public is terrifying itself with stories of murderous "burkers."

Street-smart Gustine, a pragmatist trapped in unrelenting poverty, is all heart for her nameless little son who wears--literally--his heart on the outside. His rare case of ectopia cordis is just the sort of anatomical anomaly whose study would make a name for the doctor. Amid the gathering momentum of the cholera epidemic, Henry and Gustine strike up a fatal pact: life for her son in exchange for a fresh supply of dead bodies for Henry's dissection. With mordant Dickensian wit and Elizabeth Gaskell's deft touch for gutsy outcast women seizing control of their destiny, Sheri Holman carves out a rich, imaginative adventure as incisive and as gruesomely fascinating as a 19th-century operating theater. --Rachel Holmes

Sunderland during the cholera epidemic of 1832 is bitterly divided between the rich, who believe they have nothing to fear from a disease which afflicts mainly the poor, and the disenfranchised, who fear cholera is part of a plot to exterminate them. Through the streets of the city walks Gustine, a prostitute, followed by the Eye, an old woman paid by her pimp to keep Gustine under constant surveillance. Gustine has joined forces with a surgeon forced out of Edinburgh in the wake of the Burke & Hare body-snatching scandal. Henry operates an Anatomy School but has no bodies with which to teach; Gustine, moving among the week and dying, comes across bodies all the time. He believes she can help him advance medical science, and she believes if he becomes a better doctor, he can save the life of her critically ill baby.

The truth in the streets of Sunderland was probably not far off the in-depth descriptions, but I could not finish this novel. The first few chapters grabbed me, but as the characters became more intwined with one another, the plausibility decreased to the point that I found myself skimming. Gustine was such a pathetic creature, perhaps the most admirable. The others were far from human and the story became so twisted that it lacked credibility. The historical background for old England and the potteries was my favorite part.

Very much in the spirit of classic Victorian novels of the down-trodden, "The Dress-Lodger" explores the darker side of the Industrial Revolution by giving it the face of Gustine, the potter-by-day and streetwalker by night. Wonderfully written, the writer holds back nothing in describing the desparate resignation (or is that resigned desparation?) of Gustine's plight, and that of her melodramatically handicapped child. And that is perhaps where things began to go awry for me. About half-way through the book, the plot absconded with the characters, bearing them off into pecular plot twists and turns that seemed to bear little relation to the beautifully drawn sections in the first half. As the hero, Dr. Chiver is particularly difficult not only to like, but to believe is a real as his behavior becomes increasing outlandish. Still, worth reading, if only for the well-crafted descriptions.

I could not wrap my head around this book. The writing was just strange. It was like the author was trying to put me into the story. It was written in the present tense which I found to just be annoying. I couldn't concentrate on the story because of it.

Too annoying to continue with it. It wasn't worth it. one and 1/2 stars.

The main characters in this fine historic novel have totally different backgrounds. Set in the 19th century in England plagued by cholera. An interesting developments of characters and human qualities takes place. Most sympathy is for the young prostitute who takes care for her son and others. She shows more empathy and wisdom of human life than the docter with his passion for medicine.

Like a patchwork quilt, Holman takes bits of seemingly disparate lives and threads them together into a tapestry where nothing is as it appears. The device of the third person narrator reminds me a little of the movie "Moulin Rouge"; a story within a story, or the book as a theater. There is always one story line that cycles around to the next. I'm willing to give a lot of lattitude to the plot if I'm enjoying the ride, and while that was usually true, there were also parts where the writing was just tedious, or lines of action that seemed to almost crescendo but then fizzle. Still, I certainly enjoyed it enough to keep going. I mean, where else are you going to find a character who is a ferret named Mike, on the same level of importance as his human counterparts?