BookBrowse Reviews The Girl in His Shadow by Audrey Blake

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An intriguing and suspenseful tale of mid-1800s medical science.

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The Girl in His Shadow by Audrey Blake is a fast-paced historical novel set in Victorian-era England. With both romance and thriller-esque elements, Blake — a pseudonym for co-authors Jaima Fixsen and Regina Sirois — creates a convincing tale of legal and medical suspense, all in the midst of period-accurate gory descriptions of surgeries, home births and autopsies. Tying this background color together with the book's plot-driven qualities is an exploration of the medical advances and experimentation of the time.

The novel aims to follow these subjects from a feminist angle; the protagonist, Nora Beady, is a young woman practicing medicine without a license who must contend with the misogynistic society around her. Having been taken in by Dr. Horace Croft as a child after her family died of cholera, she has, under the doctor's tutelage, developed skills befitting a medical professional. However, as women are not allowed to openly use such skills, she assists Dr. Croft in secret. The doctor himself is one for bending or outright ignoring the rules: His thirst for scientific knowledge leads him to pay grave robbers for dead bodies to study, and his pragmatism leads him to respect Nora's intellect and not view her gender as any kind of impediment to her capabilities.

The harmony of the life and work Nora and the doctor share is disrupted when Croft decides to take on an additional assistant, a young physician named Daniel Gibson. This puts Nora in an uncomfortable position, as she is obligated to hide from Daniel the crucial role she plays in Croft's practice, at least initially. Romance between Daniel and Nora is hinted at early on, and as all three of the main characters endeavor to provide the highest possible level of care for their patients, they run into legal troubles that stretch beyond the scope of Nora's activities.

In The Girl in His Shadow, historical detail blends artfully with a compelling plot. Rather than leaning too heavily on any one aesthetic or device, it maintains a light, shifting balance: There is a romance but it doesn't unfold or tie up as neatly as might be expected; there is a somber focus on matters of life and death but also humor, including an incident with a faulty door connecting Daniel's room with Dr. Croft's; the action of the novel is meticulously constructed but so are the descriptions.

While the authors successfully mix different aspects of story and genre, the novel falls short in its feminist ambitions. Nora is an embodiment of the fairly simplistic modern fantasy of a "strong woman" type overcoming obstacles, and not particularly interesting. This is all the more disappointing because, as an orphan raised by a man who keeps body parts in jars, she is set up to be a fantastically specific and captivating character, but she doesn't have much of a personality outside of the predicaments she encounters and her determination to persevere. This has the effect of muddying the waters of feminism and romance; rather than presenting a story with real elements of both, the novel ends up romanticizing feminism through a rather surface-level idea of female independence.

Of course, this should not be a problem for those looking for lighter reading combined with substantial historical fact, and The Girl in His Shadow still has much to recommend it. The real star of the book is the burgeoning scientific knowledge of the day, which is woven seamlessly into the plot, such that the reader feels caught up in the excitement of the possibilities that surround the characters as they experiment with emerging treatments and battle limitations imposed by the traditional medical establishment, all against a drearily romantic background that those drawn to Victorian-era suspense will surely appreciate.

This review first ran in the June 9, 2021 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.