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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 fallen sick are quarantined into a separate ward to keep the plague at bay. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders, a woman doctor who is a rumored Rebel, and a teenage girl, Bridie, procured by the nuns from their orphanage as an extra set of hands. At first, this Bridie seems unschooled in life, she makes up a bed with only the rubber mat and savors the weak tea and barely edible porridge from the hospital kitchen. But in the intensity of this ward, over three brutal days, Julia and the women come together in unexpected ways.… (more)
The majority of the action in The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue takes place in a maternity care room over a few days at an Irish hospital in 1918 as influenza rages. The heroine is Nurse Julia Power, who must balance the care and the lives of her patients as they fight for themselves and the lives of their babies. The book is heartbreaking, and I'm glad I'm reading it now in 2024 because I don't think I could have when it came out in 2020.
This is good historical fiction. Donoghue did her research. You are taken step by step through Nurse Power's thoughts and actions as she bravely carries on. Through the story, Donoghue explores the ramifications of poverty, disease, war, and institutions in the lives of the patients.
This takes place over three days in a maternity unit in a Dublin hospital while the 1918 flu pandemic was raging. Donoghue offers little in the way of storytelling here, but her novel details the condition of hospitals, particularly the maternity unit, and as a sidebar, conditions in homes run by the Catholic Church. It’s all pretty dismal yet it must be remembered that some of the procedures, treatments and church-run homes were in effect until much later than 1918.
The character of the doctor, was based on a real person, Dr. Kathleen Lynn, who started a free clinic.
Donoghue wrote this for 100th anniversary of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic and days after it was presented to the publisher another pandemic hit. The title was taken from the medieval Italian belief that illness proved the heavens were governing fate, that people were star-crossed: Influenza Delle stelle - the influence of the stars. ( )
When I first started reading PULL OF THE STARS, I just couldn't get into the writing style. I found the lack of quotation marks to indicate dialogue challenging to follow. I was ready to give up twenty pages into the novel, but I switched to the audiobook for a final attempt, and I'm so glad I did! The narrator did a brilliant job. Within a few minutes, I was fully immersed in the incredible story Donoghue presented.
I adored Julia, Bridie, and Dr. Lynn, and my heart went out to every woman who crossed their path. Reading this in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic made the story even more heartbreaking. I couldn't help but notice the parallels between our own situation and theirs. Though, frankly, we don't have even a fraction of the hardships to deal with that the folks in Dublin in 1918 had to endure.
Touching, heartbreaking, and incredibly immersive, THE PULL OF THE STARS was an excellent read -- especially in audio format. ( )
Still hours of dark to go when I left the house that morning.
Quotations
She doesn't love him unless she gives him twelve.
Guilt was the sooty air we breathed these days.
It's like a secret code, Bridie Sweeney said with pleasure. Red to brown to blue to black.
It suddenly struck me as perverse that someone was said to have grown up in a home only if she had no real home.
That's what influenza means, she said. Influenza delle stella--the influence if the stars. Medieval Italians thought the illness proved that the heavens were governing their fates, that people were literally star-crossed.
Nursing was like being under a spell: you went in very young and came out older than any span of years could make you.
I listened in on speculations about the kaiser being on the verge of surrender; the imminence of peace. It occurred to me that in the case of this flu there could be no signing a pact with it; what we waged in hospitals was a war of attrition, a battle over each and every body.
This world is a web of lies. Then here's to the dead already, And hurrah for the next one who dies.
I gazed up at the sky and let my eyes flicker from one constellation to another to another, jumping between stepping-stones. I thought of the heavenly bodies throwing down their narrow ropes of light to hook us. I'd never believed the future was inscribed for each of us the day we were born. If anything was written in the stars, it was we who joined those dots, and our lives were the writing.
Staff who fell sick disappeared like pawns from a chessboard.
As far as I could tell, the whole world was a machine grinding to a halt.
Physicians were as rare as four-leafed clovers.
What a peculiar job nursing was. Strangers to our patients but—by necessity—on the most intimate terms for a while. Then unlikely ever to see them again.
The mortuary was deserted. I'd been down to its white chill before, but I'd never seen it so eerily full of coffins. Six high against all four walls, like firewood stacked ready for the furnace.
(So often we had to mete out indignity on a body in a vain attempt to keep it breathing.)
Red to brown to blue to black. This poor fellow was at the end of that terrible rainbow.
Like the poor, maybe, the war would always be with us.
I'm beginning to know enough to know that I know nothing.
I was old enough to know my own mind, surely, and to be aware of what I was doing. But I seemed to have stumbled into love like a pothole in the night.
She looked pretty in a half-destroyed way.
Bridie looked see-through to me today, as if made of bone and light, wearing her flesh like a dress.
The human race settles on terms with every plague in the end, the doctor told her. Or a stalemate, at the least. We somehow muddle along, sharing the earth with each new form of life.
Last words
So I carried him along through streets that looked like the end of the world.
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 fallen sick are quarantined into a separate ward to keep the plague at bay. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders, a woman doctor who is a rumored Rebel, and a teenage girl, Bridie, procured by the nuns from their orphanage as an extra set of hands. At first, this Bridie seems unschooled in life, she makes up a bed with only the rubber mat and savors the weak tea and barely edible porridge from the hospital kitchen. But in the intensity of this ward, over three brutal days, Julia and the women come together in unexpected ways.
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Book description
Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu. A small world of work, risk, death and unlooked-for love, by the bestselling author of The Wonder and ROOM.
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, 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.
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