The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue Synopsis

 

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue

Short overview about this book :

In Dublin, 1918, a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu is a small world of work, risk, death, and unlooked-for love, in "Donoghue's best novel since Room" (Kirkus Reviews).

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.

In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.

In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds..

Book Details :
Isbn : 031649903X
Isbn13 : 9780316499033
Asin :
Page : 320
Author : Emma Donoghue
Book Release : 2021
Original Title : The Pull of the Stars


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Grappling with acute claustrophobia as I do, it's a wonder that I would ever consent to reading Emma Donoghue, who writes of constricted spaces with such arresting directness. The thing is, Donoghue expands those spaces with drama, creating a universe of emotion within four dreary walls.

I've been reading Donoghue for several years now; she's one of those authors like Atkinson, Atwood, Mantel, O'Brien, Walters who can write the range from classic historical fiction to contemporary thriller to speculative head-scratcher with equal authority and delight. I haven't enjoyed everything she's written; I'm one of the few who couldn't gush over Room, but when she has me, Emma Donoghue owns me.

Such it is with The Pull of the Stars. I loved this, from the doom-portending beginning to wrenching middle to heartbreaking end. Yes, there is a heightened sense of drama with the coincidental timing of a novel about an historical pandemic published in the middle of a contemporary world health crisis, but no matter that. This is just damn fine reading.

Unspooling over three harrowing days in November 2018 in a Dublin hospital under siege from the explosion of deadly influenza, The Pull of the Stars moves from life to death to life again in gut-churning and heart-swelling detail. The maternity ward where Julia Power, a 29-year-old nurse midwife, manages a 12-hour day shift is separate from a larger maternity ward elsewhere in the urban hospital. All of her charges are infected with the influenza in a city plagued with multiple woes: World War I, the uprising for Irish independence, a deadly contagion, and continued poverty and urban blight. The contagion is but one cross to bear among so many.

In fact, for many of her charges, those we meet during the time we spend confined in fever/maternity, as Nurse Power's one-room ward is known, and those she describes in hindsight, the deadly influenza is only one aberrant possible end; poverty, and its siblings malnourishment, exhaustion, and domestic violence take many of these women down on a regular basis. As Nurse Power describes,

“Mother of five by the age of 24, an underfed daughter of underfed generations, white as paper, red-rimmed eyes, flat bosom, fallen arches, twig limbs with veins that were tangles of blue twine. Eileen Devine had walked along a cliff edge all her grown life, and this flu had only tipped her over.

Always on their feet, these Dublin mothers ... living off the scraps left on plates and gallons of weak black tea. The slums in which they somehow managed to stay alive were as pertinent as pulse or respiratory rate, it seemed to me, but only medical observations were permitted on a chart. So instead of poverty, I'd write malnourishment or debility. As code for too many pregnancies, I might put anaemia, ... low spirits, ... torn cervix, or uterine prolapse.

Several births and deaths occur in fever/maternity during our stay with Julia and each is harrowing. But there are moments of respite, provided in sweet comic relief by Bridie Sweeney, an orphan sent by the Sisters to assist in Nurse Power's ward, and a political subplot that unspools around the real historical figure of Dr. Kathleen Lynn, a rare female physician and Irish independence freedom fighter.

I know many of us have slipped from pandemic fatigue to slam face first into pandemic wall. Perhaps reading about the ghastly 1918 flu pandemic isn't your cuppa right now; oddly, I took comfort in the cycles of history, knowing this too shall pass. And losing myself in a great read is one of best ways I know to cope with our bleak present.
Highly recommended.




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