A new student review of The Kingdom of Little Wounds

bookgirl1289 posted a new student review of The Kingdom of Little Wounds . See the full review.

I chose this book because I like historical fiction, and I am very interested in how disease was viewed in the past. But this story ended up being very, very different from what I had hoped it would be. It is definitely not a fairy tale or fantasy, even though the cover is beautiful and the design of the inside of the book is gorgeous, too. I read the author’s note at the end before I began to read, so I knew that the disease that was threatening everyone was syphilis. The parts about syphilis were actually very interesting to me, especially the ways that people at the time tried to treat it and the ways they thought that it was spreading.
    I was not prepared for the very graphic violence in the book, which made the story more disturbing than interesting. The female characters suffer terrible violence such as rape and torture (in the case of Midi). I think that this is probably realistic for the time, but it really took away from any potential enjoyment that I might have gotten from the book. The author is a very good writer but the story itself is too dark. I would give the overall book only three stars because it was so unpleasant to read and because I think it was a mistake for this book to be listed in the young adult category. I also found all of the characters unlikeable, which made it hard to keep reading.