The Pull of the Stars - Rambling Readers

Hardcover, 304 pages

Published July 21, 2020 by Little, Brown and Company.

ISBN:: 978-0-316-49901-9

(1 review)

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.

8 editions

crabbygirl reviewed The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue

Review of 'The Pull of the Stars' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

like Room, most of the action happens on one day in the fever maternity ward of an irish hospital in the middle of the 1918 pandemic. and with the chapters called Red, Brown, Blue, Black (the progressive colours of influenza to death), you knew there was a death coming
I quite enjoyed all the nurse and maternity tidbits included in the plot, but the gay-out-of-nowhere was just that. out of nowhere. in fact, given the large age difference, i'll bet some progressives might even call it problematic. i'm guessing the love interest turn was to make the death be that much more shocking and heartfelt, but doesn't anyone's death merit an emotional response? why wouldn't the reader mourn a very short friendship? a very hard life?