Author: Kimmery Martin
Publisher: Berkley Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0283-5

How's this for a novel's first sentence: "Most women did not begin their days by stabbing a man in the scrotum, but Georgia Brown was not most women"? Thus begins Kimmery Martin's second novel The Antidote for Everything, and continues in the operating room as Georgia operates an a patient's infected scrotum.

Georgia is a 36-year-old, single, urologist who works in a Charleston, SC, clinic that is attached to a church-owned hospital. (This is significant.) Her very best friend is Jonah Tsukada, a 32-year-old primary care physician who works at the same clinic and who happens to be gay.

In the opening chapter, Georgia's cell phone receives a text as she's operating. The circulating nurse asks Georgia if wants to hear the messages. Georgia's beloved dog is at the vet's being operated on; of course she wants to hear. The circulator reads silently, then suggests Georgia look at the message privately. Georgia orders her to read it, so she reads: 

"Dear Georgia, Don't take this the wrong way, but it's over. I'm guessing you don't want to see me, so I'll stop by for my board if you leave it on the porch. If you want my advice, in the future you might try to pretend you don't know more than everybody else. One more thing. You might also want to consider waxing. Or at least trimming." 

"Ouch," says someone in the operating room.

Kimmery Martin is an emergency medicine doctor-turned novelist. She grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains of Eastern Kentucky, outside a small town called Berea. She completed her medical training at the University of Louisville School of Medicine and the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. When she started writing her first novel, The Queen of Hearts, she worked in the emergency room full-time. She now lives with her husband and three children in Charlotte, and has a job that allows her more time to write. 

As an emergency medicine doctor, Martin brings authority and conviction to her medical scenes. She's (as we say) writing from the inside. And the issue that Georgia and Jonah have to confront is both true and troubling. Jonah's patients have been leaving him, which is disturbing both because they need his care and there is no convenient—or in some cases possible—alternative and because Jonah needs money. He's staggering under hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans, costly in-home medical assistance for his grandmother, and "a self-inflicted credit card issue stemming from his days as an under financed medical student." 

Jonah's patients are leaving him because the clinic has sent them letters it will no longer provide them medical services. And they turn out to be his transgender, nonbinary and gay patients. The clinic's director of HR tells Jonah "they'd been getting complaints about 'him' [one of Jonah's more flamboyant trans patients], that some of the other patients were finding the waiting room to be an uncomfortable environment when 'he' was there. He also said some of the clinic employees felt they were compromising their beliefs by taking care of 'him.'" And, "They're talking about a clinic policy allowing providers to stop providing birth control to female patients, because that also compromises the beliefs of these same employees."

Can this be legal? Apparently it is "perfectly legal in our state to refuse medical care to someone because they're transgender or gay. For that matter, it is perfectly legal to fire someone because they're gay." Because the hospital is owned by a church and does not receive federal money, it can do what it believes is Christian. So Jonah has to watch himself or he'll be out of a job. 

The Antidote for Everything is wonderfully well-written. The banter between Georgia and Jonah early in the book made me laugh out loud. (The dialogue later in the book is not so jolly.) After being dumped, Georgia begins an affair with a man who seems almost too good to be true (tall, handsome, single, with a hedge-fund expense account, and great in bed), but given everything else that happens in the novel, spending more time on Mark probably would not have added much. As it is Martin writes five chapters from Mark's point of view; the rest from Georgia's.

I'm not sure there is a single antidote for everything, but I agree with Martin that friendship is the antidote for a much of the world's pain. Reading her novel can be an antidote to the blahs; it was for me.