The flu, like all pandemics, is a leveller. We watch Julia rise, take the trolley to the hospital, work all day trying to keep women and their babies alive before trudging home to rest and do it all over again. The Pull of the Stars takes place over two days in the fall of 1918, sometime before the Armistice ended World War I. Because she has experience as a midwife, Julia is assigned to the makeshift Maternity/Fever ward. She’s already had what we call the Spanish flu, so she’s also one of the few people who can also work with the sick without falling ill herself. Julia Power is one of the few medical professionals still on their feet at a large city hospital. As always, Donoghue captures the atmosphere and feelings of what it might be like to be a nurse, on a Dublin maternity ward, while influenza scythes its way through rich and poor alike. But I worry that comments like this will overshadow just how good this book is. Because this novel recounts a small slice of life during a global pandemic-there are plenty of references to people ignoring public health warnings about spitting in public and encouraging mask wearing-this book is absolutely a book for this year. I suspect that many readers and reviewers will focus on the prescience of Emma Donoghue’s deeply affecting novel, The Pull of the Stars.
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