The Nature of Monsters

Starred review from March 5, 2007
British author Clark's second novel, a moving historical set in early 18th-century London, surpasses her acclaimed debut, The Great Stink
(2005). When teenager Eliza Tally gets pregnant, her mother sells her into servitude to an apothecary, Grayson Black. Eliza struggles to survive in a bizarre household, unaware that her new master is interested in the effects of various emotions on her unborn child. Isolated save for a kindly, slow-witted fellow servant, Mary, Eliza develops an unlikely relationship with a French bookseller, Mr. Honfleur, who supplies Black with the scientific treatises he uses to inform his sadistic researches. Eliza hopes Honfleur will provide her with the means for escape. Unlike The Great Stink
, this suspenseful tale contains no whodunit element, but as in her previous book, Clark's empathetic portrait of the powerless and the victimized will remind many readers of Dickens. Author tour.

Eliza Tally, the daughter of a midwife, is impregnated by a local lord and sold into servitude to a London apothecary. But all is not what it seems, for the apothecary, Grayson Black, keeps too watchful an eye on his new servant and experiments upon the hapless inhabitants of his house. Julia Barrie reads this ponderous story of shopkeepers and servants. Barrie's light tones contrast jarringly with the graphic sexual language and gory details of eighteenth-century births and deaths. The story engages and repulses the listener by turns as it tells of Eliza and her fate at the hands of the powerful. M.B.K. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine