Take Your Medicine by Hannah Carmack book thoughts

Title: Take Your Medicine
Series: N/A
Author: Hannah Carmack
Published Date: March 5th, 2018
Publisher: NineStar Press
Source: Netgalley
# of Pages: 92
Format: Ebook
Genre: Contemporary/Young Adult/Queer
Days to Read: 1
Rating: 3.25 / 5 stars
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Goodreads Synopsis

Alice “Al” Liddell is from Echola, Alabama. She leads the life of a normal teen until the day she’s diagnosed with vasovagal syncope – a fainting disorder which causes her to lose consciousness whenever she feels emotions too strongly.

Her mother, the “Queen of Hearts,” is the best cardiothoracic surgeon this side of the Mason-Dixon Line and a bit of a local hero. Yet, even with all her skill she is unable to cure her daughter of her ailment, leading Al into the world of backwater witchcraft.

Along the way she meets a wacky cast of characters and learns to accept her new normal.

Take Your Medicine is a southern gothic retelling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

My Thoughts

I really did enjoy this book in the end and I do think it's worth a read! However I didn't love it as much as I hoped I would either.

It's said to be a gothic retelling of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (which I have read, and enjoyed, though it's been awhile) and...I didn't see any of that. I'm not sure where the Gothic part comes in honestly, the Alice in Wonderland part felt forced with it just being (that I saw) the characters names. There's the MC Alice and she makes friends with Rabbit and Kat...and they have some friends named Mads and March.

However I did see some reviews before hand mentioning that so I didn't go in really expecting anything from that, just hoping for a short story with a queer disabled character. It definitely has a contemporary feel to me, which isn't a bad thing, I like diverse contemporary and it definitely is that.

Alice has vasovagal syncope – a fainting disorder which causes her to lose consciousness whenever she feels emotions too strongly, which the synopsis states. I have other rare disorders that when I tell them, including doctors, that I have they look at me like I have 3 heads, so when my initial reaction was that I hadn't heard of this, I googled. It seemed odd...fainting from emotions? It's real! I've heard others saying it's bizarre....real people suffer from it. I can't imagine what it must be like to not be able to experience emotions, a huge part of life, without fainting.

"Anger, sadness, surprise, happiness, I wasn't supposed to feel any of it too strongly. What's the point of living if you can't live how you feel?"

Just take that in and think about that for a minute, it's heart-breaking.

Even though I have different medical issues I did relate to her in a lot of ways regarding being disabled. Alice is in the orchard, sees a girl who she hasn't seen before and a bird attacks her hair. The surprise makes her faint. When she wakes up there is the girl and her friend, Rabbit and Kat. After explaining why she fainted and her VVS (for short) Kat says "So suprise gets ya then?" and Alice suspected her next move, despite Kat's innocent tone..

""Yes." I gulped, and Kat did exactly as expected. Before I could even back up, she jumped around and sprang herself over to me. Luckily, I was used to this reaction. I don't know why kids think it's so funny to try to scare me after i've just explicitly stated Hey, surprises makes me faint. Don't try and surprise me."

Also no one really knows what causes VVS and she mentions how everyone always wants to give their 2 cents, whether it's to recommend the best doctor or just tell her to buck up. So many people do that to all kinds of disability and chronic illness. "Have you tried eating this? This exercise? Oh just think positively! Yoga?" as if anyone with a chronic illness hasn't tried all they can to feel better and researched stuff themselves. The person who knows an illness best...is the one with it! Even if 2 people have the same thing, they still have different bodies, what works for one person or helps one person may not help another. The person with the body knows their body best.

Rabbit and Kat are witches, they try natural healing. Alice's Ma, upon hearing that, gets nasty about them. Saying they want to poison her with snake oil, that they are panhandlers, and how they aren't real and just treats them like they are dirt. Being pagan myself I was so angry reading through this story, because hatred towards paganism and witches is all too real, and those attitudes are something i've dealt with and was raised by. Reading through all that I could feel the rating dropping down fast, especially when I saw the words "Ma was right" after it all.

I wasn't asking them to be able to fix her, Holistic healing all that, magic, whatever you wanna call it, is not a cure all. It's not a magical fix anything. Natural healing might help some things, but a magic fix-it-all? Yeah, that doesn't exist. A lot of stuff pagans have been saying all along? Science has now figured out. Science and paganism can go quite well together and the world is finally figuring that out. But those hateful attitudes towards Pagans still prevail and it just felt, through most of the story, that that's what it was trying to say. That they were evil. Alice went to them for help, despite not wanting to disappoint her mother (and I relate to that feeling all too well as well!), desperate for help (again, relating here!).

I didn't want them to be able to cure her, and she isn't cured by the end of the book and that's great. I just didn't want the witches painted as evil when they just appeared to be trying to help, to care. They were nice people, not your evil wicked witch, just regular people trying to see if they could help someone. Thankfully the ending turns it around! Maybe it's not perfect, but I sighed with relief at the ending. Obviously I don't want to spoil it but I will say I was glad in the end.

And no, I don't hate her Ma. I never did, I was frustrated with her. Frustrated, angry, sure. But I know she had the best of intentions and was so worried and scared because she didn't understand and just wanted to protect her daughter. I don't hate her for that. I hate the prevailing misunderstandings and hate that has been so Christian fueled in history towards Pagans. And please don't put words in my mouth. I'm talking about history and general things, not every Christian.

My only other thing I could say is the f/f romance, while it did make me make a *squee!* face, did feel rushed (it is a short story..). I definitely think this story has so much more potential if all of it had been a bit more fleshed out into a fully sized novel. Wishing it was longer though isn't a bad thing! If it was bad I wouldn't want to read more of it!

Oh and also, there was an unexpected treat of Rabbit has some anxiety that I also really related to!

So all in all I related to so many things with Alice and I loved her. She is a stubborn, sweet, black, queer, chronically ill mc that I really did love reading about. My only wish really is that the story had more time to explore it's potential. I do think it's worth a read and I will happily look to reading more from Hannah Carmack.