Dress Lodger, The
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By turns ribald, irreverent, heartbreaking, and horrifying, The Dress Lodger is the story of those who were sacrificed so that modern medicine might advance. Sheri Holmans riveting story is superbly narrated by Nadia May and flawlessly produced by Blackstone Audiobooks in this complete and unabridged theatre-of-the-mind format.Reviewers Bookwatch
Narrator Nadia May is at her best as she narrates this bizarre story with appropriate irony and even humor.AudioFile
In this Dickensian tour de force, fifteen-year-old Gustine is a dress lodger, a prostitute who rents a beautiful blue dress from her landlord to attract a higher class of clientele. To make sure she earns her fees and to keep her from running off with his fantastical gown, her pimp has set a malevolent old woman, known only as the Eye, to follow her. By day a potters assistant, by night a courtesan of the streets, Gustine works to support her fragile only child, born with a remarkable anatomical defect.
Surgeon Henry Chiver is a prisoner of his own past, implicated in the Burke and Hare killings in Edinburgh, in which beggars were murdered so the corpses could be sold to medical schools. He has come to Sunderland to start a new life, but his anatomy school is chronically short of teaching cadavers.
Doctor and dress lodger come together in the filthy, overgrown end of town. Here, during the worst epidemic since the bubonic plague, Gustine secures bodies for the doctors school, until Henrys greed and his growing obsession with her child challenge her loyalty to him. With cholera bearing down on the city, Gustine must turn to her mortal enemy, the Eye, in her battle for the life and afterlife of her only child.
Nadia May has been nominated as an AudioFile Golden Voice five years running and is a winner of thirteen AudioFile Earphones Awards. She is the co-founder of TheatreFirst, a theater company in the San Francisco Bay Area where she currently lives.