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Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
In Dickson Lane’s Kakaki, The Ghost Walker, nineteen-year-old Amalie “Leelee” Thomason arrives at the London home of surgeon Dr. Cameron McCrea in 1855 determined to secure a position in medicine, bringing an anatomical portfolio that shows her knowledge of the human body. After McCrea tests her observational skill, Leelee enters an apprenticeship in a profession changing almost as quickly as her ambitions. Yet the path ahead is shaped by rules that rarely imagine a woman as the physician holding the instruments. Her pursuit of surgery carries her across the Atlantic, where the outbreak of the American Civil War places her training in a different world. As Leelee follows medicine into places she never expected to go, her ideas about healing begin reaching beyond conventional practice, setting in motion the extraordinary life behind the name Ghost Walker.
Dickson Lane’s Kakaki, The Ghost Walker is a really well-executed historical novel, and Leelee is a protagonist we want to root for. Lane fleshes her out as a gifted physician whose instinct stays connected to the person she is treating. That comes through at St. Benedict’s, where she uses warm chickpeas from an Ayurvedic remedy as a congregation sings Amazing Grace. I think, for me, the ethics of a character in medicine are one of the most important traits, and Lane is brilliant at grounding Leelee’s medicine in a belief that every patient deserves the same humanity. A wounded Confederate soldier amid Union lines shows that. I love how Lane turns his settings into almost characters in their own right, from a London morgue’s cold locker lined with covered trolleys, to the Arctic’s blue-white highway of snow and ice beneath autumn color. Readers seeking historical fiction built around medicine with an unconventional heroine will adore this book.
