A gripping, multilayered depiction of a transformative medical investigation.
García Saúl’s historical novel dramatizes real-life figure Lt. Bailey Ashford’s discovery of a successful treatment for anemia caused by hookworm infestation, the leading cause of death in Puerto Rico at the turn of the 19th century.
In 1898, Southerner Ashford, 25, is a bit disappointed to be sent to Puerto Rico instead of Cuba as his first assignment as a U.S. Army Medical Corps doctor during the Spanish-American War. His deployment in Puerto Rico, however, turns out to have important consequences. Ashford provides critical medical support as the U.S. gains Puerto Rico from the Spanish at the wind-down of the war. Further, he meets his soon-to-be wife, and, most significantly, observes and then seeks to address the deadly anemia plaguing rural coffee-plantation workers and their families. A hurricane, temporarily halting plantation operations, brings sufferers, notable for their pallor, as a “caravan of specters” into Ashford’s base city. The influx allows Ashford to ramp up his studies, aided by his interpreter, an aspiring microbiologist and son of a rich American based in Puerto Rico; the now city-based son of a rural family devastated by this disease; and an American nun working in a city clinic. Through analysis via microscope of patients’ blood and examination of their feces, Ashford establishes that hookworms are entering through the skin of tropical climate inhabitants who walk barefoot and don’t have access to proper latrines. He identifies and tests a low-cost drug treatment to expel these parasites, eventually getting support to bring the treatment to clinics in rural areas. Resistance is rampant, however, but then the “legendary White Eagle” bandit breaks the impasse, with a commission launched to stamp out this disease in Puerto Rico and elsewhere.
In this highly engaging diagnosis-hunting/clinical trial–focused fictional account, Florida-based medical doctor García Saúl, a Puerto Rico native educated at Harvard and Yale who practiced medicine for 28 years in Massachusetts and Kansas, effectively makes his case that the achievements of Ashford, “not the subject of common discussions or island holidays,” deserve more attention and recognition. As with most such narratives, one sometimes wonders just how much artistic license is being exercised, such as in García Saúl’s rather melodramatic portrayal of the White Eagle bandit, also a historical figure. Occasionally, medical terms (specifying the white blood cell type of eosinophils, for example) may baffle lay readers, although García Saúl is quick to explain these terms in the context of his plot. Readers will be transfixed by Ashford’s journey—and the magnitude of what he accomplished. García Saúl skillfully showcases the critical human factors involved in advancing science, detailing not only Ashford’s dogged persistence, but also the heroic decision by a rural family to take the drug treatment (even though one of their own died during Ashford’s early testing of it) and local hospital nuns’ bravery in administering the drug despite their superiors’ ban regarding it. “Imagine an often-fatal disease that affects 60 percent of our current population...imagine a rookie medical graduate stating that by simply taking a few pills, thousands upon thousands (millions, if we extrapolate to today) of people can be restored fully to health in a matter of days,” marvels García Saúl in his author’s note. Readers of this book are greatly aided in this imagining thanks to this consummate, lively fleshing out of Ashford’s landmark work.
Pub Date: April 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781940300962
Page Count: 346
Publisher: St. Petersburg Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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