1/11/2024 0 Comments Dana schwartz bookHazel is someone who’s incredibly ambitious, smart and focused. The book is called a “love story,” but it doesn’t follow the typical arc of a romance novel, and Hazel’s romantic life takes a backseat to her love affair with surgery. And when that became a threat in our real pandemic, I pulled it because I didn’t want people to get the wrong message. In my original version, I had a character selling a cure for the fictional plague that turned out to be a sham. Because plagues were a thing in history and I was writing a book that involves a lot of dead bodies, it only made sense that there would be this big atmospheric threat. I began writing this book a year before we had even heard of COVID. Did the pandemic influence your writing at all? Where: Mysterious Galaxy, 3555 Rosecrans St., No.There’s a plague making its way through Edinburgh in the book. I thought this was going to be a one-off, but when I reached the ending, and I sat with that for a few months, I thought that there’s something else here.” Mysterious Galaxy presents Dana Schwartz “But right now, I have an idea for a sequel that I really want to tell and I think will be really fun. “I want to take each story as it comes, and I wouldn’t want to write a book if I wasn’t genuinely excited about the story,” Schwartz says. She isn’t sure if she sees “Anatomy” as being an ongoing series of novels but seems open to the idea. 1 on the bestselling fiction charts, Schwartz says she’s already working on a sequel to the novel. “I would not have wanted to write a novel that wasn’t funny or doesn’t have funny lines, but at the same time, I wanted to put my bleeding heart out on the page.” “I sort of began my career writing snarky things on the Internet, and I sort of gravitated towards being funny, but it was also liberating for me to write a really earnest novel,” Schwartz says. She brings a sly sense of humor to an otherwise serious novel filled with gruesome elements to a point where the reader might find themselves laughing out loud mere seconds after reading about the innards of a corpse. It’s still easy to see her razor-sharp wit, most evidenced on her often hilarious Twitter posts, on the pages of “Anatomy” as well. “So I felt much more confident in the voice of the 19th century than I otherwise would have.” “I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words of narrative history for the show,” Schwartz says. In addition to being an accomplished cultural and entertainment journalist, she is also the host of “Noble Blood,” a podcast started in 2019 that explores the often brutal reigns of some of history’s most notorious monarchies. Schwartz has explored these types of issues before. There was a social and cultural line, so I wanted to explore in a way that doesn’t necessarily label the characters as heroes or villains.” “Obviously today, there is a huge wealth gap that continues to grow, but in the 1800s, the aristocracy made that wealth gap explicit. “The main mystery I wanted to pick at and unravel is who gets forgotten in society and for what purpose,” Schwartz says. Both through Hazel and, more explicitly, through Jack, Schwartz says there are contemporary issues that the reader will recognize. “It’s a love story between a girl and the rest of the world.”Īnd while Schwartz says she’s reluctant to use the word “historical fiction,” because readers might see it as “stuffy” and “boring,” she does seamlessly weave in descriptions of class and social statuses in 1800s Edinburgh. “Hazel is falling in love with more than just a person,” Schwartz says. Given Hazel’s affluent upbringing and Jack’s impoverished background, the story has all the elements of a forbidden romance, but Schwartz maintains that the true “love story” is one that is much more “nonspecific.” And yes, there’s a romantic subplot between Hazel and Jack, a “resurrection man” (a rather poetic descriptor for a person who dug up fresh corpses from graveyards to sell to hospitals and doctors for dissection). Then there’s that subtitle: “A Love Story.” Readers could think they’re in for some kind of torrid, pre-Victorian romance novel. People are always like, ‘I want to live in the good old days,’ and I’m always saying, ‘Um, no you don’t. “It was very important to me to make sure everyone knew that this wasn’t just some romanticized view of the past. “I always knew I didn’t want to shy away from the more gruesome elements of surgery,” Schwartz says. Yet, they are necessary to understanding how science was evolving around this time and why Hazel desperately wants to be part of that awakening. And sure, the blood, gore and gruesome depictions of grave-robbing and surgical procedures, using descriptions such as “pulled out a molar with a sickening crack” and “pulled at a few of the still-bleeding veins,” will likely be cringe-inducing for many readers.
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