It’s easy to see why this was a sensation when it was published. It came out right when House M.D. and Grey’s Anatomy were finding audiences, and it’s easy to see how it could have been a unique thing at the time. Medical drama was the zeitgeist at the time, and this book seems like it was created in a lab to appeal to a mass market in that exact moment. Unfortunately, almost 20 years later, there’s not a whole lot to set it apart.

Lam is very good with drama and plot, but his characters range from ‘forgettable’ to ‘not credible’ and the dialogue doesn’t read like people really speak. The first few stories failed to connect with me in a big way – I didn’t like the characters at all, and the drama itself felt very surface-level.

As the book wore on, things improved — the characters kind of faded into the background and the themes became more prevalent, which I found made the whole thing more compelling. Still, not terribly memorable or unique — but I’m pretty sure it would have been in 2005.