What We're Reading Now: Cathy

The Coral Thief by Rebecaa Stott.

Daniel Connor, a medical student, arrives in Paris just after Napoleon has been captured and sent to St. Helena. He is planning on studying anatomy with the great Dr. Cuvier at the Jardin des Plantes but his letters of introduction and gifts of rare fossils for the Doctor, are stolen by a mysterious woman on the coach to Paris. He finds her but then falls in love and gets mixed up with her on the wrong side of the law. Discussions on the mutability of species and the origins of the world are constantly discussed by the medical students, the naturalists, the anatomists, and even the thieves. Daniel finds the "heretical" ideas of these French philosophers disturbing but also intriguing. It's an interesting portrayal of a time and place that are usually skipped over because everything - government, property, science, identities - were in flux.