After reading I am the Messenger, I didn't want to go back to reading 3 star fiction from the class library as usual. So I dug through the piles of uncorrected proofs and damaged library books sitting around the house... and I found The Apothecary. I don't generally like historical fiction, but this feels somehow more real. There's even a letter from the main character, Janie at the beginning explaining how she found her diary and wrote a story from it. Although it includes a song that was written almost 20 years after the book takes place, every detail and emotion seems straight from the mind of a fourteen year old girl in 1952. It focuses mainly on her day to day life, like what happened in Latin class or the cute boy whose father runs an Apothecary. But there's a looming shadow of the Cold War in every corner of her life. Janie's family moved because they were being followed by the government, and kids are taught bomb drills at school.
I'm only on Chapter 6, so I have no idea what the plot is going to be. I do know that this boy Benjamin and his father are going to be important, as they run the namesake of the book. At some point Janie and Benjamin are going to be separated, there may be something magical involved, and something is going to make Jamie forget about it all. The cover shows the Tower Bridge and the Tower of London in a glass bottle. There are two birds inside the bottle, both the size of the buildings, separately. A much larger bird is perched at the neck of the bottle. This might represent freedom from London, which Janie doesn't really love, or that London and freedom are in the bottle as a medicine to help her. In America, Janie and her family were being followed because they were Communists. In London, there's freedom from the judgmental American government, but it's a shockingly different place from L.A., so it might turn out to help or hurt Janie.
