However, she touches on these issues, uses them to power her plot, and then drops them before they become too heavy or ambiguous. In The Antidote for Everything, Kimmery Martin creates an opportunity to speak about the outrage of denying medical treatment to trans patients, pro-discrimination “religious freedom” laws in some American states, and the burdens that come with identity, even in the year 2020. Jonah and Georgia both make terrible mistakes and pay for them dearly, but everything comes out all right in the end. From there, the novel’s plot twists and turns multiple times, revealing secrets and barely allowing the characters to evade disaster. Meanwhile, she pursues a too-good-to-be-true romance with Mark, a wealthy financier whose life she saves on a flight to Amsterdam. Georgia gets tangled up in the situation because of her love for Jonah, who is more like a brother or a life partner than a friend, and because of an ugly secret she carries related to one of the clinic’s board members. Their cover is the “moral code” of the clinic’s founders, which in South Carolina allows companies and people to discriminate for “religious” reasons in hiring, firing, and even making wedding cakes. The clinic has been dismissing Jonah’s transgender and LGBTQ+ patients via letters in the mail without Jonah’s approval, and now they’re planning to dismiss him as well. Her best friend, Jonah, a gay family practice doctor, is about to be fired from the clinic where they both work. Georgia Brown, a straight white female urologist in her mid-thirties living in South Carolina, has a problem. However, for this reviewer, and in the specific example of this book, the ease with which The Antidote for Everything surrenders to these patterns is a disappointment. As with mystery novels, the pattern of a mainstream women’s fiction novel is a vehicle for a specific kind of reading enjoyment-a space for developing sympathetic characters and delineating the struggles with which middle-class women resonate. For many readers, such adherence is an advantage. These sentences are not meant to disparage mainstream women’s fiction, but to acknowledge that the genre has certain patterns and tendencies, and The Antidote for Everything adheres to them extremely well.
The book may tackle political or social issues, but it will do so in an unthreatening way, and the resolutions to those issues will be simple, pleasing, and complete. This means the book is likely to have emotionally wrenching situations and a happy ending. It is women’s fiction, released by Berkley, a gold-standard mainstream press for books read and written primarily by women.
The main thing to know about Kimmery Martin’s second novel is its genre.
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