Review: The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue

Title: The Pull of the Stars

Author: Emma Donoghue

Year published: 2020

Category: Adult fiction

Pages: 304

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Location: (my 2026 Google Reading map): Ireland

Summary: 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 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.

Review: This has been on my shelves since it first came out. I loved Donoghue's novel Room (link to my review), so I had high hopes for this one.

This novel isn't really plot-driven as it covers only three days in a maternity ward during the 1918 Spanish flu. What Donoghue does is paint a (grim) picture of Ireland in 1918, where the poor continue to have many babies, the flu is ravaging everyone, babies and their mothers are struggling (many not surviving), and Nurse Power is trying to hold it all together.

I felt like I was in the room with the nurses and patients, sitting on the edge of my seat with worry and, sometimes, hope. The descriptions are detailed: medical maneuvers that seem too old-fashioned now, but were the height of modernity at the time. Donoghue captured the time and the essence brilliantly.

Challenges for which this counts:

• Cover Lovers--a time piece (pocket watch)
• Mount TBR