Tag: Cutting for Stone book review

Genre: Historical Fiction
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪.5

Cutting for Stone is a sweeping historical fiction that covers generations. It is primarily the story of Marion and Shiva, twins whose mother, a nun, dies during childbirth, and whose father, a surgeon, runs away with no acknowledgement that the children are his. The two are raised in Ethiopia near the mission hospital where they were born and Marion develops a love for medicine that leads him to follow in his father’s footsteps.

I was in awe by how much depth and breadth this book was able to cover, from the backstory of the twins’ parents through their childhood and into their adult lives. I found the personal stories and character details compelling. There were also sections dealing with political unrest and turmoil and I found these parts a bit more difficult to follow. I wished there had been amore historical context to set the stage.

There were parts of this book that moved a bit slowly and could have been cut down. The section set during the twins’ childhood was much longer than that of their adulthood and I would have liked some more balance to get to know them once they were older. There were also a lot of really graphic medical scenes and doctor jargon that I skimmed over. They didn’t add to the book for me and took me out of the story when they popped up.

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