A review by nicnatreads
Delicate Condition by Danielle Valentine

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Really fun read. Oftentimes these thriller-esque books can have a “cool girl” voice that causes me to cringe to the point of a DNF. There were pieces of that here and there but it was minimal. This truly was a modern take on Rosemarys baby with many events pulled straight from that book. There were some definite differences though that I loved. I appreciated the feminist messaging throughout. The modern problems and scenarios were fun and oftentimes relatable. I liked the ending and how the story was wrapped up for the most part. It was a longer book but I enjoyed it the whole way. However the one major thing that I didn’t appreciate was the clear disgust with allopathic medicine. As someone who works within and practices allopathic/evidenced-based medicine, I’m obvs biased; however, the story had a strong position of nihilism in terms of medicine.  Many medical issues have a veil of uncertainty (aka lack of evidence) and those in the field have come to say “we don’t know” more frequently in recent years because that’s the ethical thing to do. When there’s little evidence it’s more ethical to communicate uncertainty rather than provide false hope in a cure that has little-to-no evidence. Snake oil cures have been a common scam for centuries and I think criticizing the field of medicine that has the most structured and evidence-driven guidelines isn’t really helpful. Dont get me wrong, it’s not without its flaws and should be scrutinized. But I can’t think of any alternative fields of medicine I’d trust any more than it. But I digress -

The story was still so fun and I couldn’t wait to get back each time I had to put it down. 
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