Do you like your characters quirky, with a side of brilliant? Do you like your stakes dire? Do you like a story where you accidentally learn a little anatomy and history?
You're going to love The Impossible Girl by Lydia Kang. Following the days and nights of Cora Lee, medical marvel and astute business woman, and her twin brother Jacob, resurrectionist, The Impossible Girl is a detailed adventure through graveyards, medical museums, libraries, houses of ill repute, and medical school dissection galleries. I'll let you decide which of those just might be the more unsettling in descriptive detail. Speaking of detail, I appreciate that Kang's details are straight forward. She doesn't wax poetic when describing corpses or what might otherwise be an unsettling environment. She lets the environment or object speak for itself with concrete terms. I like it.
The Impossible Girl, like so many other books worth reading, doesn't allow itself the luxury of only telling its own story. It weaves in the politics of the era: economic politics, gender politics, racial politics, and even scientific politics. It all plays a role in every step of the tale's unfolding, carefully unfolding as a near inevitability.
After finishing the story, my kids, as has become a sort of tradition this summer, asked me to tell them about a book I'd read recently while we swam. There were a few key things I had to edit out of the story because the 11 year old is 11, but both the 11 year old and the 21 year old were utterly captivated at even the abbreviated messed up out of order version. Let's just say "mom's book talks" aren't exactly the most A to B things. There's a lot of "guuuuuurl, and then creepo from the museum," (because the guy who runs the museum is 100% a creeper) and "so she straight up follows him like a grade A stalker."
You'd probably have to be there. So since you weren't, you'll just have to read the book.
Serioiusly. Read it. It's good stuff.
