An often riveting fictional testament of a doctor’s life at the turn of the 20th century.
A young woman defies societal norms in her personal life and career in Daly’s debut historical novel set in 1897 Philadelphia.
Eighteen-year-old Eliza Edwards comes from a family of passionate dreamers. She sees her aunts Estelle, Florence, and Josephine—in their respective careers as a stenographer, art teacher, and secretary and board trustee—as role models and struggles to accept a seemingly fated future as a housewife and mother as her debut in society approaches. After a field trip with Josephine to the library at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, Eliza meets medical student Anandi Gopal Joshiand finds the missing piece in her heart: “The students at Woman’s Med. have forged their own paths. I wish to do the same.”After completing med school, Eliza accepts a position at the West Philadelphia Hospital alongside Dr. Patrick Callaghan, her former professor. As love blooms between them, Eliza balances her responsibilities to her career and to her family. After a devastating event, she takes a trip to Boston to visit her brothers and their loved ones and finds that a new life awaits her there. She must make difficult choices as she fights for her family, her vocation, and her lifelong dreams. Daly presents a well-researched story that weaves the fictional details of Eliza’s life with major, real-life historical events. Her careful crafting of each character, and her detailed, old-fashioned setting of each scene, encourages readers to root themselves in the moment, and as a result, they’ll feel emotionally invested in the protagonist’s every sadness and joy. Daly also develops Eliza’s family ties and shows her passion for social change through her career choices and her opinions, which have a strong feminist element. It results in a work that effectively showcases the power of love, friendship, and faith—both in one’s calling and in oneself—to create change in the world.
An often riveting fictional testament of a doctor’s life at the turn of the 20th century.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68513-014-5
Page Count: 355
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2022
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 dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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