One cold February evening in 1791, at the back of a dark London alley in a hidden apothecary shop, Nella awaits her newest customer. Rule #2: The names of the murderer and her victim must be recorded in the apothecary’s register.

Rule #1: The poison must never be used to harm another woman. Throw in a juicy mystery, murder, intrigue, and an entire strata of secret-keeping, and you get a novel that lifts up the skirt of history to reveal women running the world. This novel is a reclamation project, a resistance narrative, a bringing back to life the stories and bodies of women and girls who save us every single day of our lives. The Lost Apothecary reminds me of my favorite kind of stories involving women and girls, the ones where an author or artist embarks on an archeological dig through history in order to unbury alternative storylines. She examines the artifacts of the past as if her own life could be put into pieces and reassembled alongside the women and girls in her city who spoke back to their culture. Upon discovering a centuries-old vial in the Thames, she begins to investigate the history of an underground apothecary. Present-day London: Caroline Parcewell is part historian, part detective, part time-traveling explorer. But this delicious storyline does not sit silent and still inside the vestiges of invisible history. With her potions, Nella gives them a material means for controlling their own lives and fortunes.

The city seethes with sexist sins against women, and yet, the women and girls who navigate their worlds turn out to be tenacious and brilliant. I was predisposed to love The Lost Apothecary, a novel that toggles between past and present, where the lives of women are woven together to recreate history.ġ8th-century London: Penner had me at the apothecary itself, a kind of reliquary where poisons are sold by the mysterious Nella to women who seek revenge on the oppressive men in their lives. Different storylines recede, others come forward, statues topple, new voices and bodies that were once repressed emerge. I’m obsessed with history, but not history as a set of events locked in and legitimized by a set of dates in time and space I am obsessed with history because it is alive. Let’s face it, I’m the kind of reader who thrills in time travel.

Sarah penner the lost apothecary