94 TIME January 31/February 7, 2022
TIME OFF BOOKS
A BLOODY
LOVE STORY
Some will know Dana Schwartz
as the host of the Noble Blood
podcast, where she tells stories
of royals past; others through
the parody Twitter account
@ GuyInYourMFA, which she
started as a college student
in 2013. There are also her
books—among them her
globetrotting YA debut And
We’re Off and a misadventure-
fi lled memoir, Choose Your
Own Disaster.
Her latest, a YA novel
that mixes the historical and
supernatural, is the romance
Schwartz wanted to read when
she was growing up, complete
with an ambitious heroine, a
swoony fi rst love and plenty
of gore. Anatomy: A Love
Story follows Hazel Sinnett, a
noblewoman in 1817 Edinburgh
who dreams of becoming a
surgeon. In need of cadavers
to study, she teams up with
resurrection man Jack Currer
to practice on the dead and
living alike. But as live patients
begin arriving with missing
limbs , Hazel and Jack realize
there’s a sinister force at work
in the city.
Anatomy may technically
be a romance, but the real love
story is between Hazel and
surgery. That’s just one of the
notes Schwartz hits that feels
a little more earnest than the
snarky writer who fi rst broke out
on Twitter. “I’m writing for my
teenage self, and part of being a
teenager is this weird optimism
that you can do anything in
the world,” Schwartz says.
“That’s the feeling I’m trying to
capture.” —Simmone Shah