Review: Stalking Jack the Ripper by Kerri Maniscalco
Overview:
Rating: 3 out of 5.
This is my 50th read of the year! Ahh! Overall, I enjoyed the nuance of the main character and the general world-building (even though it’s not 100% historically accurate). I do think this book failed in its development of the love interest, the pacing, and its exploration of gender roles.
Content Warning:
Stalking Jack the Ripper contains homicide, violence towards women, extreme gore, sexism, and mentions of drug abuse.
Book Description:
Taking place in 1800s London, Stalking Jack the Ripper is a YA horror novel with a pinch of historical fiction. Audrey is a young woman with a wealthy family and an interest in science. By day she tries to fit into polite society, by night she secretly helps her uncle perform autopsies. When a string of murders is committed by the infamous Jack the Ripper, her uncle is implicated as a potential suspect. With the help of another student, she must solve the crime before more innocent lives are lost.
On the Historical Accuracy of the Book:
As Maniscalco herself admits, this is a book where the historical facts are worked around the story and its invented characters. Going beyond revisionist history, Stalking Jack the Ripper is chock-full of artistic liberties. Anyone looking for an extremely detailed, historically accurate account of events probably won’t get what they want out of this book. However, despite major changes to the timeline of Ripper’s crimes, the exclusion of certain folks from the story, and the creation of a new ending to the timeless mystery, Maniscalco still conveys a generally strong sense of the period. As the reader, I still felt like I had been transported into a fully-fledged world that was representative of 1800s England — complete with archaic gender norms, diction differences, and image references to real historical events and institutions.
On the Characters:
The complexity of Audrey’s character took me by surprise. For the most part, she is the stereotypical, strong female lead that is popular in works of young adult fiction. She’s smart, a little tomboyish, and eager to defy the gender roles placed upon her. What makes her stand out from other characters in the genre are her less beseeching qualities, including her sick fascination with gore. The internal debates she has with herself over the morality of enjoying the sight of a fresh corpse adds a layer of conflict to the story and made her more human to me.
Opposite of Audrey is her crime-fighting partner Thomas Creswell, a character I did not enjoy nearly as much. His reactions towards others often felt erratic and unsupported by the text — he would be insanely cruel one moment and adoring the next. Maniscalco tries to blame his bad behavior on the untimely death of his mother, but that doesn’t explain why he takes a liking to Audrey, his sporadic flirtations with her, or his loyalty to her uncle. In addition to such poor character development, I also didn’t like how Maniscalco used Thomas’s power of deduction as a plot device to move the story forward. At times, he was like a bad Sherlock Holmes, pulling clues about the killers’ psyche out of thin air. These moments felt both unbelievable and ridiculous.
On the Pacing of the Book:
This book was first described to me as a crime novel, and I was expecting a fast-paced investigation full of clue finding, forensic science, and theory development. While these elements do exist in the text, the characters mostly find a lot of dead ends. Additionally, because of Audrey’s disapproving relatives, she spends a lot of time forced into non-crime-solving activities such as tea parties. At these points in the story, it felt more like our main character was a passive element in the story, rather than an active participant and I got bored.
On the Book as a Feminist Text:
A major focus of Stalking Jack the Ripper is dissecting gender roles and their negative effect on women, but the book is only half successful in doing so. On one hand, Maniscalco makes it clear that girls can care about their looks and still be smart/strong. On the other hand, she shames the other female characters because they are not as interested in science as Audrey is — suggesting that women who enjoy stereotypically feminine hobbies instead of stereotypical masculine hobbies are lesser than!