75th out of 245 books
—
111 voters
The Nature of Monsters
by
Clare Clark
1666: The Great Fire of London sweeps through the streets and a heavily pregnant woman flees the flames. A few months later she gives birth to a child disfigured by a red birthmark.1718: Sixteen-year-old Eliza Tally sees the gleaming dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral rising above a rebuilt city. She arrives as an apothecary’s maid, a position hastily arranged to shield the fath...more
Hardcover, 400 pages
Published
May 7th 2007
by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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I am definitely guilty of wanting to read a book simply because I love the cover, though I do take into consideration the plot as well. But here we have a dark, gothic novel set in the early 1700s, more twisted and mad than Mr Rochester's crazy wife, complete with resourceful heroine and beastly experiments done in the name of science and medicine, set against the stinking refuse, pollution, grime and decay of London, as well as the political and religious freedoms, traditional superstitions and...more
The exact words that came out of my mouth after reading this were “Well, that was a waste” as I put the book down, dismayed at what it was I just read. Believe me, the description on the back cover was a much better read then the actual book itself. It seemed at first that this could be an interesting concept, something intriguing. A young girl finds herself pregnant and later forced under the subjugation of a mad scientist during 18th century England. What’s not to like, right? Well, from the m...more
In 1718 England, sixteen-year-old Eliza is recently married, but when she conceives her husband renounces her. She is sent to London to work for an apothecary, Mr. Black, that she believes will rid her of her burdenbut Black has other plans. He is writing a treatise on the effect of female imagination on unborn children, and he intends pregnant Eliza to be his first case study. Taking place deep within the dark and dirty underbelly of 18th Century London, The Nature of Monsters is almost so gri...more
This is what happens when you have a babysitter, and can browse your local book store without your wee one tugging at your skirts begging for the latest Sandra Boyton book.
Do not be fooled by the well written dust jacket description of this book, for it is a far better read than the book itself. It seemed so intriguing: a book set in early 18th century London. A girl finds herself pregnant, and at the mercy of a mad scientist. You would think, what a good read.
*sigh*
This is why you should never...more
Do not be fooled by the well written dust jacket description of this book, for it is a far better read than the book itself. It seemed so intriguing: a book set in early 18th century London. A girl finds herself pregnant, and at the mercy of a mad scientist. You would think, what a good read.
*sigh*
This is why you should never...more
Nov 28, 2008
Terence
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommended to Terence by:
Shannon
Shelves:
historical-fiction,
horror-gothic
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
The story opened with a pregnant woman escaping the great fire of London. The piece was well-written and interesting both in story and characterization. But then the book switches to fifty years later, where we are immersed in the explicit lustings of a sixteen year old farm girl for a gentleman who her mother is trying to ‘capture’ via pregnancy (it works). The problem is that it was too explicit for me and once past all that, not all that interesting.
So I started skimming. And I kept skimming....more
So I started skimming. And I kept skimming....more
On a whole, this book is much better when you look at the entire picture than actually reading it. I read the cover and thought that I would possibly be reading a twist on Frankenstein. Not so. The main character is deeply flawed and I had a hard time trying to see her as a heroine. In the end, when she steps up for Mary and stands up to the Master, do you even feel sympathy for her. I do like the concept at the end, well what I felt the overall concept is: you create monsters within yourself. T...more
I just kept wondering when this book was going to get interesting. When was she going to get out....what happened to her baby...so many questions. I felt like the main character was one person in the beginning and totally another at the end....but not in a good way...just in one that did not make sense. I have to admit I was drawn to the book by the cover and the time period.
Eliza Tally is young and as is most often the case, she thinks she is in love. But when the man she is supposedly married to dismisses their marriage as only a country ritual, her mother knows what will happen to a pregnant young girl and quickly works out a transaction with the man, sending Eliza to London to work for an apothecary. Since Eliza's mother is a cunning woman, she has seen the results of her mother's craft and assumes that the apothecary will expel the thing growing inside her and...more
I read the comments of other Goodreads followers only after I had got about halfway through the book, some I agree with, others, I can see their point of view as I don't enjoy everything that I read either! This book fell into the very enjoyable category which surprised me as it is totally out if my normal reading genre.
London during the rebuilding after the great fire must have been a dreadful place to live if one was of lower class. In this story, servants are treated as belongings and women...more
It is a rare thing for me to dislike a book as much as I did this one; even rarer for me to finish it, but I felt I had to, if only to see if things improved. They didn't. This was simply not my cup of tea, and I don't believe that is Clare Clark's fault at all. I was seduced by the back-cover blurb which made it appear that the predominant portion of this novel took place during the Great Fire of 1666. That is a period in English - and particularly London - history which I adore. I'm all about...more
May 04, 2012
Frank
rated it
4 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
historical,
thrillers-mystery
I really enjoyed this very dark novel about life and superstitions in the early 18th century. Clark did a marvelous job of describing the time period especially the squalor of old London. The monsters in the book could have been many of the characters or all of them including the protagonist Eliza's employer and master, the apothecary Grayson Black, his wife, or the apprentice Edgar. Or was Mary, the "idiot" servant who was also vile-looking and generally disgusting, considered a "monster". Or c...more
Atmospheric and darkly suspenseful, Clare Clark’s The Nature of Monsters is a tale in the vein of gothic horror that is as unsettlingly cruel and captivatingly vivid. Essentially a straightforward, plot-driven historical novel wrapped in the macabre nuances of early English medical practices, Clark illustrates the monstrous acts of true evil and those who dwell in it. Her characters are strongly represented and despite her almost unbearable subject matter, where the lines between quackery and sc...more
Oct 30, 2011
Noorhaina
rated it
1 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Nobody
Recommended to Noorhaina by:
Nobody to blame but me
It's a fast read, but the prose gets tedious quite fast too. I understand that the author is a history expert of some sort, and that the early 18th century setting of the story calls for a style of writing that matches the time. But it seems unbelievable that a book written from the point of view of a midwife's daughter should contain ample servings of similes, metaphors, and an extensive vocabulary! The author goes overboard with her descriptions and prose, perhaps because of a deep love for th...more
Clare Clark's "The Nature of Monsters" is an odd little title. I suppose you could call it historical fiction, which is okay, or historical fictional horror, which is even better, but it's not quite that either. Following sixteen-year-old Eliza who is sent away to live in secret as a maid when she gets pregnant out of wedlock. Not that she's letting that get her down; she has every belief her beloved will eventually come for her. But as the days drag by without word, she finds herself having to...more
In eighteenth century England, much of science was still in its infancy, as evidenced by the central theme of this book, that whatever a mother experiences while pregnant will somehow imprint itself on the baby inside her. It is these maternal experiences that are the cause of various congenital deformities, according to the knowledge of the day, and the study of these impressions is what the apothecary of the novel, a Mr Black, has devoted his life to studying. In his quest for knowledge, he ex...more
Loved the imagery in this book set in the 1700s. I grew to really like Eliza, the narrator of the book, who goes from being a naive young girl and a pawn in her mother's schemes to a woman who pushed her way to freedom in a time when women did not have as many options. The story underlying this journey was interesting and suspenseful despite the monotony of her life in the apothecary's home, and I kept turning the pages despite myself (and the time of day). :o)
When I started this book, I almost put it down on page one! It started out with a very graphic description; not salacious, but coarse and rough. I just couldn't imagine reading an entire book with this type of language, but I pressed on, skimming some of the coarser descriptions. I'm glad I did.
The Nature of Monsters is told by Eliza Tally, a coarse (hence the language), headstrong young woman living in England in the early 1700's. The question you consider throughout the book is what really ma...more
The Nature of Monsters is told by Eliza Tally, a coarse (hence the language), headstrong young woman living in England in the early 1700's. The question you consider throughout the book is what really ma...more
Feb 02, 2011
Flora Bateman
rated it
5 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
general-fictin
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
This novel presents the 18th century in it's full reality. London is a rough, dirty, dangerous town. The divide between rich and poor is well defined and unbreachable. Poverty is prevalent, vulgarity in all it's forms the norm. Clare Clarke doesn't hide behind graceful descriptions, the author gives us a real feel and chills in her writing, London once was a terrifying city to dwell in. It is surprising people survived to adult age, murders, disease and filth where everywhere.
This novel addresse...more
This novel addresse...more
Dark and mysterious, and very Dickensian - which makes it weird that I liked it because I really loathe Dickens.
Does an excellent job of absorbing the reader in London in the early 1700's. I felt absorbed in the world - the writing was incredibly evocative. Think I will pick up Clark's first novel since I enjoyed this one so much.
Does an excellent job of absorbing the reader in London in the early 1700's. I felt absorbed in the world - the writing was incredibly evocative. Think I will pick up Clark's first novel since I enjoyed this one so much.
I don’t normally abandon books. I have this irrational idea that if I start a book, then I must finish it, whether I am enjoying it or not. But occasionally I will come across one that I just can’t finish, and The Nature of Monsters was, unfortunately, one of those rare few.
The thing is, I can’t say definitively what I dislike about it. The story is set primarily in London in 1718 – a time and place that I normally enjoy reading about. The book centers around a 16-year-old girl named Eliza. She...more
The thing is, I can’t say definitively what I dislike about it. The story is set primarily in London in 1718 – a time and place that I normally enjoy reading about. The book centers around a 16-year-old girl named Eliza. She...more
Eliza and Mary are two maidservants in an apothecary's shop in C18th London. At different points in the story both are pregnant and both of them are the unwitting test subjects of the mad apothecary who is writing a treatise on how the mother's imagination and experiences affect the unborn child. I'm in two minds about this novel. On the one hand, i can't deny that it's a captivating page-turning story with characters i cared about and richly atmospheric, evoking the age in great detail. However...more
This is one of those books where the synopsis on the sleeve turns out to be better than the story. I wanted to like this book; I actually thought it started out pretty strong but by the middle I was beyond depressed and bored-- strange combination, and not one that goes hand in hand with a good read.
What was flawed... where do I start? The main character was a prisoner in this story despite being described and plucky and brazen... if she had any pluck, she would have fled much sooner and the boo...more
What was flawed... where do I start? The main character was a prisoner in this story despite being described and plucky and brazen... if she had any pluck, she would have fled much sooner and the boo...more
I am conflicted....
This book is definitely not a waste of time, it was easy to read and it was an enjoyable experience; my 6 hours on this novel was well spent and I took away several critical life concepts/skills from this novel such as "listen to what people say, but listen even more closely to what they do not say"-Ma Tully.
If you are looking for a book to read just for pure entertainment *your not looking for material that will leave an impression on you and blow your mind away when you ar...more
This book is definitely not a waste of time, it was easy to read and it was an enjoyable experience; my 6 hours on this novel was well spent and I took away several critical life concepts/skills from this novel such as "listen to what people say, but listen even more closely to what they do not say"-Ma Tully.
If you are looking for a book to read just for pure entertainment *your not looking for material that will leave an impression on you and blow your mind away when you ar...more
Having read some reviews of Clark's other work, I gather that she has found her niche as a writer of historical fiction by including all the awful details that other novelists and histories have left out, such as how bad everything smelled, how unclean everything was, and how difficult life could be. She does these details well, but they occasionally become too dominant. The synopsis on the back cover intrigued me and I had some high hopes for this one, so perhaps it deserves a bit more than 3 s...more
An apothecary in the 1800s, determined to prove the validity of his scientific observations, attempts to create monsters by terrorizing two pregnant women. Perhaps due to the amount of books I've been reading in the past while, but as interesting as this book's subject is, it failed to fully capture my admiration. Not even sure if I'm going to keep it to read again or if I'm going to pass it on.
"Books are like people. They do not bear loneliness well. Those that remain unnourished by another's...more
"Books are like people. They do not bear loneliness well. Those that remain unnourished by another's...more
Although I knew that this book took place in the 18th century I was thinking monsters like Frankenstein. It took me almost the entire book to realize it meant "monsters" in the sense of unusual people, people with birth defects, etc., culminating in the Elephant Man a century later and finally petering out with the end of the freak shows in the 20th century.
Since I've read a lot about Maternal Impressions and other "scientific" theories about how abnormalities come about, I put my confusion down...more
Since I've read a lot about Maternal Impressions and other "scientific" theories about how abnormalities come about, I put my confusion down...more
Book ring book for Bookcrossing.com . I had forgotten all about this one. Must read and send on before Apr 4.
Set in the 1700’s. The book starts out with a woman fleeing from a devastating fire. Then it jumps ahead 50 or so years and we meet Eliza who is a young woman all worked up over a sexy young man. The opening scene was something akin to an erotica novel but you won’t hear me complain. Eliza’s mother is the local midwife but fears being accused of witchcraft and wants to have her daughter...more
Set in the 1700’s. The book starts out with a woman fleeing from a devastating fire. Then it jumps ahead 50 or so years and we meet Eliza who is a young woman all worked up over a sexy young man. The opening scene was something akin to an erotica novel but you won’t hear me complain. Eliza’s mother is the local midwife but fears being accused of witchcraft and wants to have her daughter...more
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hard to get into, but good | 3 | 25 | Mar 11, 2013 09:51am |
CLARE CLARK is the author of The Great Stink, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and The Nature of Monsters.
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