Wickett’s Remedy by Myla Goldberg follows the life of Lydia Kilkenny in the early twentieth century.  As she becomes a successful and happy counter-girl at a department store in South Boston, where she has worked since graduating the eighth grade, Lydia meets her future husband Henry Wickett. After they are married, Henry quits medical school and starts his own business, though not a successful one.

With Lydia’s help, he creates Wickett’s Remedy, a mail-order medicine whose contents boast no real medicinal benefits. Instead, Henry hopes to cure his clients with the letters he includes with the bottles of medicine.

It is these epistolary exchanges with his clients – who do not bother to send money after their bottle of the Remedy – that Henry hopes will cure these people, as writing love letters to his now-wife helped him become healthier and more outgoing, as well as fostering in her a latent feeling of love for him.

After Henry’s untimely death by the flu epidemic that rampaged through Boston, and after mourning both her husband’s loss and eventually her older brother Michael’s loss, Lydia loses all interest in continuing the business of Wickett’s Remedy and allows her late husband’s maybe-business partner to take it over and becomes a nurse’s aide in an experiment to see how the flu is caught.

Along with following Lydia’s life, the book also follows an alternate timeline wherein Wickett’s Remedy is turned into a booming soft drink empire. Wicketts’ former business partner, Quentin Driscoll, takes all credit for coming up with QD Soda and doesn’t reveal the truth until the veritable end of his life, where nobody would believe him anyway.

In the margins of the book is a running commentary from a chorus of other voices who show that memory and perception is a slippery slope and everyone has a slightly different version of what happened.

Not to spoil the ending for any interested readers, but it is satisfying.

Goldberg has also written Bee Season and Time’s Magpie.