Bess is a witch's daughter during the witch hunt, a doctor during Jack the Ripper's murders, and a doctor during the first world war. Those were my favourite parts, the lives of people in these historical periods, although the book was darker than I thought it would be. There's multiple explicit sexual assault scenes, as well as bloody murder and adults and children dying of the plague.

I have two pet peeves with this book that I couldn't get over while reading:
1. Idk what Publishers Weekly is on, but an immortal woman living linearly through 300 years is not time travel. This is not a time travel story.
2. The blurb in the book says the present-day timeline is in 2012, but in the book it's actually 2007.

These are both small things, but they felt like kind of lazy mistakes.