Meet Tristan Hart, a brilliant young man of means. The year is 1751, and Mr Hart leaves his Berkshire home for London to lodge with his father's friend, the novelist and dramatist Henry Fielding, and study medicine at the great hospital of University College. It will be a momentous year for the cultured and intellectually ambitious Mr Hart, who, as well as being a student of Locke and Descartes and a promising young physician, is also, alas, a psychopath. His obsession is the nature of pain, and preventing it during medical procedures. His equally strong and far more unpredictable obsession is the nature of pain, and causing it. Desperate to understand his own deviant desires before they derail his career and drive him mad, Tristan sifts through his childhood memories, memories that are informed by dark superstitions about faeries and goblins and shape-shifting gypsies. Will the new tools of the age - reason and science and skepticism - be enough to save him?
Unexpectedly funny, profoundly imaginative, and with a strange love story at its heart, The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones is a novel about the Enlightenment, the relationship between the mind and body, sex, madness, the nature of pain, and the existence of God.
Author: Jack Wolf
Publisher: Penguin
Release Date: March 26, 2013
Acquired Via: Publisher via TLC Book Tours
Joint Review
We (that is, Kayla and Will) both read The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones by Jack Wolf and are doing our first joint review.
Kayla: So, Will, how did you like it?
Will: Just a few pages in, I was already thrown off. Archaic wording and weird syntax and odd capitalization Of words that Don't really need it. Weird. I hoped It was just the prologue weirdness And that it would get Over it. Yeares?!? Years! Gah!
Kayla: Yeah, that held me up a little at first, too. I did get used to it, and it did not really take away from the readability of the book. I guess I figured out how to block it off in my brain. You did capitalize the wrong words though. Mr. Wolf only capitalized every noun. How did it go other than that?
Will: Ummm.... I haven't even gotten past chapter 3...
Kayla: Well, that's it for the joint review, I suppose. It did pick up, but it was not an easy read.
Kayla's Review
The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones was a book that actually pretty well embodied everything that is teased in the description. It is a book about a psychopath who has a morbid obsession with pain, therefore making it a book that was not exactly easy for me to read. However, it was truly a beautiful and imaginative novel that I was happy to work through.