Darkly compelling, illuminated by the light of compassion and tenderness: Donoghue’s best novel since Room (2010).
A nurse in a Dublin hospital battles the ordinary hazards of childbirth and the extraordinary dangers of the 1918 flu.
Donoghue began writing this novel during the 1918 pandemic’s centennial year, before COVID-19 gave it the grim contemporary relevance echoing through her text: signs warning, “IF IN DOUBT, DON’T STIR OUT,” an overwhelmed hospital bedding patients on the floor, stores running out of disinfectant. These details provide a thrumming background noise to the central drama of women’s lives brought into hard focus by pregnancy and birth. Julia Power works in Maternity/Fever, a supply room converted to handle pregnant women infected with the flu. The disease makes labor and delivery even more high risk than normal. On Oct. 31, 1918, Julia arrives to learn that one of her patients died in the night, and over the next two days we see her cope with three harrowing deliveries, only one of which ends well. Donoghue depicts these deliveries in unflinching detail, but the gruesome particulars serve to underscore Julia’s heroic commitment to saving women and their babies in a world that does little for either. Her budding friendship with able new assistant Bridie Sweeney, one of the ill-treated “boarders” at a nearby convent, gives Julia a glimpse of how unwanted and illegitimate children are abused in Catholic Ireland. As far as she’s concerned, the common saying “She doesn’t love him unless she gives him twelve,” referring to children, reveals total indifference to women’s health and their children’s prospects. Donoghue isn’t a showy writer, but her prose sings with blunt poetry, as in the exchange between Julia and Bridie that gives the novel its title. Influenza gets its name from an old Italian belief that it was the influence of the stars that made you sick, Julia explains; Bridie responds, “As if, when it’s your time, your star gives you a yank.” Their relationship forms the emotional core of a story rich in swift, assured sketches of achingly human characters coping as best they can in extreme circumstances.
Darkly compelling, illuminated by the light of compassion and tenderness: Donoghue’s best novel since Room (2010).Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-49901-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An engaging story is marred by an overblown narrative style.
Three characters separated by geography and time are united by a single raindrop.
In her latest novel, Shafak presents readers with an ambitious, century-spanning saga that revolves around three distinct characters hailing from different parts of the world and different time periods. There’s Zaleekhah, a hydrologist who has fled her marriage to live in a houseboat on the Thames in 2018; Narin, a young girl who lives along the Tigris in Turkey in 2014, where she is gradually going deaf; and Arthur, a brilliant young boy born into extreme poverty in mid-19th-century London. Zaleekhah, Narin, and Arthur are united by a literary device that often feels overly precious: a single raindrop that, through a repeated cycle of condensation, falling, freezing, and/or thawing, reappears throughout time to interact with or afflict each character. Shafak’s attempts to personify the raindrop, which is described as “small and terrified…not dar[ing] to move,” fall flat. As a whole, the novel is engaging, with a propulsive narrative and an appealing storytelling voice, but Shafak is overly reliant on certain stylistic mannerisms, such as long lists of descriptions or actions that, stacked one upon the other, quickly grow tiresome, as in this description of Victorian England: “Spent grain from breweries, pulp from paper mills, offal from slaughterhouses, shavings from tanneries, effluent from distilleries…and discharge from flush toilets…all empty into the Thames….” Worse is Shafak’s tendency to overwrite and to pursue a self-consciously baroque narrative style (lots of betwixts and whilsts), which occasionally results in convoluted or overly intricate phrases. “Did not our readings of poetry leave unforgettable memories?” one character asks early on. Less, as it turns out, sometimes does count for more.
An engaging story is marred by an overblown narrative style.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593801710
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Neither the characters nor the mystery makes nearly as much of an impression as the setting and the cuisine.
More accurately, Four Murders Most French, since none of the homicides entangling Julia Child’s circle in postwar Paris seems any more Gallic than the others.
Joining Julia at a tasting during a monthly meeting of her wine club at L’École du Cordon Bleu, her neighbor, friend, and amanuensis Tabitha Knight is on hand to watch Chef Richard Beauchêne taste his very last wine, an 1893 Volnay Clos de la Rougeotte that he samples just before keeling over. Cyanide, thinks Tabitha, whose determination to stay away from anymore murders is on a collision course with her sense that she’s channeling Agatha Christie. Although Inspecteur Étienne Merveille wholeheartedly endorses her reluctance to get involved, she’s left with little choice after she recognizes Louis Loyer at another event as the chef who was arguing with Beauchêne on the evening of his last libation only moments before Loyer uncorks an 1871 Sauternes that turns out to be his last round as well. Assuming that the two poisonings (more will follow) can’t be a coincidence, Tabitha wonders if it’s a coincidence that she’s been on the scene for both of them and begins to make a cautious list of other people who were present for both deaths. Considering that she’s not much more interested in the suspects than her author, Tabitha does a highly effective job of identifying the culprit and tipping her hand in a way that forces her once again to employ her Swiss Army knife to rescue herself from certain death.
Neither the characters nor the mystery makes nearly as much of an impression as the setting and the cuisine.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781496739629
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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