The Lost Apothecary

This book was frustrating.

There were parts, whole sections even, that I liked. And then it'd come back to Caroline's perspective, and I'd have to restrain myself from yelling at her.

Caroline drove me up the wall. She's in London by herself on what's supposed to be her tenth anniversary trip with her husband. Caroline just discovered he's been having an affair. Still, she decided to make the trip anyway to have space to sort through her feelings. Caroline comes across an old vial while on a mudlarking tour of the Thames. She dives into researching its history, partly as a way to avoid her problems at home. What follows is a former history student breaking into a historic site, disturbing it, hiding it from people with actual knowledge of the period and how to process sites (not to mention her new friend that works for the British Museum) and manages to be suspected of murder because she's so protective of this site she won't explain why she was researching poisons. Or hey, maybe showing the cops THE PICTURES ON YOUR PHONE OF THE REGISTER WITH THE SUSPICIOUS INGREDIENTS YOU WERE GOOGLING (Oh, sorry, not googling. Or searching. Navigating to the phone's web browser).

My issues with the story that aren't based on my dislike of Caroline:
• There were attempts to create suspense and mystery when it wasn't there and just made the story lag. Honestly, if I had been reading the book instead of listening, I would have skimmed large chunks of the text because it just wasn't necessary.
• The descriptions around any use of technology were weird and just too descriptive. For example, Caroline would navigate to her camera app. I'm not planning on visiting the British Library and replicating her archival searches, so I didn't need a step-by-step guide on using the filters.

I did not like the ending whatsoever, but perhaps my biggest problem with it is that Caroline throws the vial back in the river. The vial that led Caroline to this whole journey of uncovering the apothecary, which she'll be writing her dissertation on at Cambridge. And she threw it away because she was keeping Eliza's story to herself? Was this a purposeful juxtaposition to Nella keeping a register of customers so history wouldn't forget those women? At the same time, Caroline quite literally throws a record away? Either way, it was a stupid and unnecessary ‘symbolic moment.'

Audiobook Review: All of the narrators did a good job, but I'd sometimes up the speed during Caroline's sections to get through them faster. Perhaps that's because I'm from the US, and the accent sounded bland and neutral compared to Nella and Eliza's sections. Perhaps it's because the character was annoying. Who knows. I especially loved the performance for Nella's sections – the raspiness and the slowness just felt perfect for the character.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.