Publication May 21, 2024=Kensington-Historical Fiction-384pp
Book Summary
This spellbinding story of a determined female doctor pushed into life as part of a menacing swindler’s traveling medicine show in order to support her son is rife with unflinching prose and set against the backdrop of the devastating Galveston Hurricane of 1900.
Once a trailblazer in the field of medicine, Dr. Tucia Hatherley hasn’t touched a scalpel or stethoscope since she made a fatal mistake in the operating theater. Instead, she works in a corset factory, striving to earn enough to support her disabled son. When even that livelihood is threatened, Tucia is left with one option—to join a wily, charismatic showman named Huey and become part of his traveling medicine show.
Her medical license lends the show a pretense of credibility, but the cures and tonics Tucia is forced to peddle are little more than purgatives and bathwater. Loathing the duplicity, even as she finds uneasy kinship with the other misfit performers, Tucia vows to leave as soon as her debts are paid and start a new life with her son—if Huey will ever let her go.
When the show reaches Galveston, Texas, Tucia tries to break free from Huey, only to be pulled even deeper into his schemes. But there is a far greater reckoning ahead, as a September storm becomes a devastating hurricane that will decimate the Gulf Coast—and challenge Tucia to recover her belief in medicine, in the goodness of others—and in herself.
Grateful Reader Review by Dorothy Schwab
Mounting debt forces Dr. Tutia Hatherly and her son, Toby to join a traveling medicine show led by Hugh Horn, “The Amazing Adolphus.” Skenandore’s startling, graphic descriptions of medical practices in the late 1800’s, the struggles and discrimination of women in medicine, and the dangerous working conditions in factories set the desperate mood of Tutia (Tu-sha) as she valiantly attempts to support her son.
The tenuous relationships with the performers, snake oil sales, palm reading, and shady, vagabond adventures consume Tutia as she travels with the medicine show for several months. Stressful situations and an anxiety disorder caused by Tutia’s guilt and deception are alternated with the life story of four of the performers, the Giant, the Indian, the Tinker, and the Musician. These backstories add emotional connections for readers as Huey announces that the medicine show is headed to Galveston, Texas, to “overwinter.”
The Great Storm of 1900 becomes a pivotal time for Tutia, the performers and the medicine show. Skenandore explores themes of unrealized dreams and new beginnings as Tutia and Huey are pitted against the hurricane’s raging storm surge. Discover some of Galveston’s well-known landmarks, Post Office Street, The Strand, and Murdoch’s Bath House in The Medicine Woman of Galveston, as the “worst natural disaster in U. S. History” washes ashore.
The Grateful Reader 