I was drawn to this book because my husband is a doctor and I met him during his fourth year of medical school. When I learned the author is a DO I was excited because my husband is also a DO. I figured this would be like Samuel Shem’s House of God, which is a satirical novel chronicling 6 interns first year of residency, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
This “novel” chronicles James Banks’ third and fourth years of medical school- the clinical years where he does monthly rotations with different specialties. This is not a novel. If anything perhaps it can be categorized as a fictionalized memoir, as Dr. Champion makes sure to note at the beginning that some names (but not all) have been changed.
While the bits about the patients he saw were interesting, I was extremely turned off that every woman he met was described as either attractive, cute, or obese and the men were described as either handsome or overweight- this was the same regardless of whether the person was a patient, a patient’s family member, the attending doctor, a nurse, a drug rep, or a fellow medical student or resident.
By the last quarter anytime I read the words, “Wow, you’re tall!” or the like spoken to James by an attending or “I’m a Christian” spoken by patients, James, and practically every other person, I audibly groaned because we get it- you’re tall and you are Christian living in a Christian area.
In the beginning he mentioned going home and logging his patient encounters in a journal and the majority of this reads like it’s that journal that was published along with some context of the rotation. While he mentions his wife in nearly every chapter, it feels like she was an afterthought and perhaps added to give this book less of a journalistic feel. All in all, the big takeaway here is not anyone can be an author.
Thank you to NetGalley and Roundfire Books for an advanced copy of this. Adventures of an American Medical Student hit the shelves on May 1st.

Really wanted to love this book, but unfortunately it felt rushed at times, felt like I was reading a handover sheet at work rather than recounting his adventures.
Good read for those that want to see into a day in the life of a student in different rotations of medicine.

I love reading medical memoirs, and I initially thought that's what this was--I missed the fact that it is billed as a novel. Unfortunately, it does not succeed on either front. I expect novels to have some semblance of plot, interesting character development, and/or creative writing structure. This book has none of those. It is clearly nothing more than a thinly-veiled account of the author's experiences as an osteopathic student, rotating through the various medical specialties.

As a medical memoir, it also failed to capture my interest. The author mechanically describe the patients he saw in the same way (and perhaps copied from) his clinical notes. There was a lot of technical jargon that I found hard to decipher. And he described many interactions that can only be characterized as mundane.

What made this a one-star review for me was the author's casual homophobia, and misogyny. .Another reviewer mentioned racism, but I have to admit, I didn't make it far enough in the book to see that.

Overall, a very disappointing read, I'm sorry to say.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

While this isn't the best book like this I've read, I did enjoy it. I'm not employed in the medical field, but I lived in a hospital with my medically fragile daughter for months, so I understood the medical lingo. If the medical field isn't interesting to you, you won't like this. It doesn't go into big details and reads more like a journal.
Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC! These opinions are my own.

I mistakenly thought this was a biography - which it is but disguised for obvious reasons. Having a nursing background in the (dim!) past was what appealed to me and I found interesting. However I do think it will mainly appeal to those who have a medical background. It is explained well, with footnotes where needed but is quite a dense read. Each patient is described and introduced in the same way, which I found grating but there was a good cross section of patients as the student moved through the various departments and it was clear he enjoyed some more than others. Not really ‘Adventures’ and overall I found it disappointing.

Thank you to NetGalley and Roundfire Books for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I was initially excited to read this as I was also once an osteopathic medical student who went to a school in a rural Appalachian town. As such, I really wanted to like this book more (yay for representation kindasorta, or so I thought) and it somewhat pains me to rate this the way I did.

When I first read the synopsis, I thought this would be something similar in fashion to When Breath Becomes Air/The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly, in that there would be a plot, character development, a conflict, lessons learned, etc. I think if I'd read this less with that kind of mindset and more so as a "medical review with anecdotes and patient presentations/vignettes in the eyes of a 3rd/4th year medical student," it would've better set my expectations and I might have enjoyed it more.

We'll start with the good -- this was a great reminder of a lot of the things you have to learn and commit to memory in medical school for the sake of taking your licensing exams and not looking like an idiot when your attendings pimp you (+ also in medical practice, depending on what specialty you go into). Sometimes when you're going through medical school, I think it's hard to realize all that you've learned until you look back on it like this. It brought about a lot of nostalgia/all kinds of memories about similar patients I'd seen and experiences I'd had , as he touches on a lot of the medical issues that unfortunately plague that region of the United States in particular.

But. I don't think this reads too well as a story, and if not for the trip down memory lane that it brought me + the refresher on medical knowledge, I don't think I would've really enjoyed this read. The author's writing style was very detached/disjointed and not very engaging (at least not to me). I didn't feel that there was much character development since everyone was described so superficially/like an objective(-ish) patient presentation (e.g. "appeared their stated age, well groomed, attractive, wearing navy pants"). (Also, you do meet so, so many different people in medical school in such a short amount of time that it can be really hard to get to know anyone, so in that sense, this may not really be the fault of the author.)

However, the dialogue still feels flat and the chapters felt repetitive/formulaic, as almost every single rotation/chapter started off with a description of where his attending went to school/where they were from/what they looked like, what the facilities looked like, then a comment either from a patient or his attending about his height, and then ended with, "I thanked them for the experience and they gave me a good evaluation."

All that said though, what I actually found the most off-putting = how frequently he described female patients/other students/coworkers as "cute/sexy/slim/attractive/fit" and most of all, the casual racism strewn throughout the book. Was it necessary to to mention the "thick exotic accent" of every single FMG (foreign medical graduate)/non-white attending he came across? Was there truly a need to describe one of the other medical students as the "sexy curvaceous Latino" [should that not be Latina?] who "spoke English as a first language?" Why go out of your way to take every opportunity to point out American vs. non-American medical students/graduates?

What the author does really well with is explaining all the medical cases/terminology in parentheticals + footnotes. I think the target audience for this would be if you're interested in medicine, and in particular, if you're someone who wants to go to medical school and want a kind of "slice of life" view into what the last two years of medical school can be like, as this does give a good general picture for that.

It pains me to give the rating I have, as I was quite interested in the premise of this book. Adventures of an American Medical Student is a fictionalized portrayal of medical student rotations prior to residency. It follows James, a hopeful future psychiatrist, as he navigates learning about several specialties from hospitalist medicine to neurology to ob/gyn. Many of his patients are also struggling with comorbidities exacerbated by the social determinants of health, such as addiction due to the opioid crisis.

The main reason for my low rating is because it simply does not read as a medical fiction. It reads much more like a fictionalized memoir of the author's own experiences. If this was how it was marketed, then the reading experience would have been much better as I would have had different expectations. However, as a medical fiction it felt like there was almost no plot. Each chapter focused on patient vignettes, but there wasn't really much character development, there wasn't really any overarching conflict (outside the isolated ob/gyn and the COMLEX events), and each chapter could have been a stand-alone entity. Additionally, the non-vignette writing was quite repetitive (for example, nearly every first page of a chapter started with some comment about James' height).

Now, as someone with a PhD in the medical field who sees patient cases (and sometimes patients) regularly for work, I do want to commend the educational strength of the vignettes. There was a lot of information in each, even the shorter ones, with nice descriptions of the physician's logic for each resolution.

Ultimately, as a medical fiction, I'd only give this a 1/5. As a fictionalized memoir, however, I'd give this a solid 3/5. My rating here is therefore the average of the two.

Champion narrates a physician's journey throughout his residency in different areas on his way to become a psychiatrist.
Most of the detail is about patients seen and medical cases, which is quite interesting and educational. Each chapter has footnotes and definitions of what was discussed so the reader can learn about medications and conditions.
Very slow paced but educational and interesting if you are either in the medical field or just interested in medicine.

This is a medical student's account of his residency in pursuit of his license and a career in psychiatry. He takes us through the various modalies and medical specialties, as he is required to shadow a specialist in all forms of medical care. His test scores aren't great, and his superiors seem less than empathetic toward peers or patients. But eventually he covers all bases of medical specialties, however perfunctory depending on his interest in those particular rotations (he especially doesn't like ob/gyn). It's an interesting birds-eye view into what's required to obtain a medical degree, even before pursuing further education in one's chosen speciality.