“Why did I have to fall in love with a dedicated female scientist? She considers marriage some kind of prison.”

108. The Corpse Queen – Heather Herrman

The 1850s, Philadelphia, right about when the Mutter Museum was about to get started is perfect timing for a story about grave robbing. Molly is in an orphanage, but she’s about to get too old and one of her best friends has just died, or been killed, and the only clue as to who killed her is that they knew about her vestigial tail and cut it off. Also, unlike lots of other orphans who will at some point have their faces washed and their hair pushed behind their ear so someone can tell them they’re actually pretty under all the poverty, Molly is plain and not hiding preternatural beauty, which was a nice twist for a YA novel. Molly is also not afraid of hard work and has her guard up, which made sense. She’s also ambitious, or realizes she’s ambitious once she is picked up unexpectedly to go live with her very rich aunt, the titular corpse queen. Through a lot of extremely gross work, Molly figures out that learning quickly skill she has could actually be useful for a future, which she aims to have. This was a good read and had a lot of grime and smells and medical gore. The main female characters had a lot of differences and were resourceful and although I do enjoy the supernatural, I liked that this story was grounded in knowledge and effort and pushing oneself to get somewhere with advantages or without. It did not paint a nice picture of male medical students of the time, but the ones in this story didn’t really deserve a nice depiction either so oh well.

Thorfy and Snuffy, a cute little couple manipulating a graveyard, just like in the book.