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Are you the sort of person who has found comfort in These Times by reading tales of other pandemics throughout history? Or about historical social uprisings? Or the failure of institutions to protect those they are charged to? Then The Pull of the Stars is for you, since it takes place in Dublin during the Spanish Flu pandemic at a hospital run by the Catholic Church.
If you want to focus on none of those things – wait on this read for a few years or so. It’s achingly emotional, fully of evocative prose, because everything Ms. Donoghue does is.
But it’s a rough read, folks. It’s rough.
And it’s not made any easier by the fact that this book – like Sally Rooney’s Normal People – has decided that quotation marks is beneath it. WHY, pray tell, are we getting avant garde with quotation marks? They’re good things – they help us know when someone is talking and when they’re not. They’re not, I don’t know, abominations of yesteryear. This trend can die whenever it wants, as far as this reviewer is concerned.
But the story itself is dense in the best ways – Ms. Donoghue layers her characters and plot arcs like cake and discovering the ways they collide is always rewarding. It follows a nurse who is taking care of the maternity ward in a Dublin hospital during the worst of the flu. It’s a small story in terms of characters, but a large one in terms of themes.
However, this is not an exemplar of her work. My low grade here is partially to do with her fear of quotation marks which greatly decreased my reading enjoyment, but also with the speed of the final reveal. The plotting was a little… off for me. More than any of her other works, this felt like she had Things To Say instead of a story to tell and I think the story is lesser for it.
As an aside – if any of you read it and want to learn more about Mother and Baby Homes, rent Philomena or The Magdalene Sisters and off you go. Learning that piece of Irish history and bearing witness to the stories is worth your time for sure – I’m just not entirely sure The Pull of the Stars is quite the place to learn it fully.
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Grade: B-
Book Type: Historical Fiction
Sensuality: N/A
Review Date: 23/10/20
Publication Date: 07/2020
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
Voracious reader, with a preference for sassy romances and happily ever afters. In a relationship with coffee, seeing whiskey on the side.
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I just finished “Before We Were Yours” by Lisa Wingate, and mistreatment of orphans was not just an Irish phenomenon, as the Wingate book is based on an actual orphanage in Memphis. I do second Kristen’s movie recommendations about Ireland, however.
I’ve not read the Donoghue so don’t know if she discusses it at all, but I’ve noticed that many references to that flu pandemic now call it the 1918 flu rather than the Spanish flu. The disease didn’t originate in Spain, but the Spanish were the only ones honest about the extent of its spread so they got tagged with the name. I think current writers are now trying to correct the record.
Donoghue’s Frog Music is one of my favorite books of all time (I could not, however, fully stomach Room in book form, and reading Slammerkin was like slowly being drowned in a bog.). Intrigued by this, but going in with lowered expectations.
I hope a lack of quotation marks doesn’t become a trend. That’s just irritating? sloppy? stupid? I don’t know but I don’t like it :-(
I agree! Not only do I not like it, I won’t read a book without them.There are SO many great books out there. I don’t need an author making it more difficult to read their books. That’s a really easy criteria for me to cull a book from my pile.
Donoghue’s SLAMMERKIN is a very good historical fiction—definitely not a romance—about the working class in the 1700s and how women’s limited options often meant sex work was their only viable choice. However, the ending is extraordinarily downbeat—although, if you’ve read much of Donoghue’s work, you’d know that is pretty much par for the course. (Also, I don’t recall any lack of quotation marks, so she must have used them appropriately, because I’m sure I would have remembered their absence.)
If you’d like to read a book about responses to the plague (and so much more), Jordy Rosenberg’s CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX is a complex but rewarding book about a transgendered thief and his biracial lover (who is also a sex worker), much of it set during the last major outbreak of plague in England.