Book Review: The Wages of Sin
The Wages of Sin by Kaite Welsh is the first book in the Sarah Gilchrist Mysteries series. The book follows first-year medical student Sarah Gilchrist as attends the University of Edenborough the first year it admits women into their medical school.
The book is a murder mystery but it’s also a historical commentary about the plight of women in the late Victorian area as women have beginning to make inroads in gaining their independence. The story has an additional layer of showing this from the perspective of young women who comes from the upper class where young women are even more controlled by their families.
Sarah Gilchrist was born in London to a wealthy family and just like all young women from the upper crust she’s expected to find a good match, marry, and become a dutiful wife. However, this all changes one night when Sarah is assaulted, and her virtue is destroyed. This makes her damaged goods and for all intense and matter useless to her family. She is sent to Edenborough to live with her aunt and uncle and allowed to enter medical school.
While I found the murder mystery part of the story interesting, I figured it out pretty quickly, however, that’s not the main driving force of the story, for me, what drives the story and makes it compelling is reading Sarah’s journey. The woman she’s becoming is very different from the woman she once was. She learns to empathize with others who are not of her social class but nonetheless have been abused and trampled on by those around them and society as a whole.
The story has a feminist slant and I enjoyed the exploration of the rivalry of women. The author doesn’t go too in-depth into it, but she does address it, which I appreciate.
Overall I enjoyed the story a great deal, 4 stars.
