The riveting Everything Is Poison takes place in 17th-century Rome, "just across the river" from the setting of Joy McCullough's extraordinary debut, Blood Water Paint. This novel is less harrowing but no less affecting.
When she turns 16, Carmela Tofana is finally permitted to learn the secrets of her mother's apothecary shop. With those secrets come hard-won lessons as Carmela creates and dispenses all manner of tonics and balms. But "the amount Carmela has never considered about the world, about the hair-thin lines people walk every day, knocks her off-balance with each new person she helps." These include Violetta Raso, Carmela's nemesis, who purchases a love potion and returns for a remedy to its results; Eleonora, a sex worker stabbed by a man who didn't want to pay; Nina Santori, Carmela's childhood friend, now pregnant with twins; and Patrizia Moretti, who claims to have "every ache and pain under the sun" because what she truly wants is a cure for her violent but influential husband. When Carmela makes a fateful error in judgment, the consequences threaten not only the future of the apothecary but also the lives of the Tofana women.
McCullough skillfully reveals the origins of the apothecary shop and the women who work there, imbuing her historical novel with a moving sense of its characters' individual but intersecting backstories. Carmela's lessons at the shop are fascinating; even better is the camaraderie and warmth among its workers and customers. McCullough portrays some of life's most gut-wrenching challenges, but she doesn't make Carmela face them alone. In her powerful novel, an open heart proves the ultimate cure. --Stephanie Appell, freelance reviewer