Scan barcode
A review by bookwoods
The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
5.0
Oh Emma Donoghue, why on earth do I keep dismissing your work?
The thing is, I read Kissing the Witch, a collection of feminist fairytale retellings, years ago and fell in love with Donoghue’s prose, yet every time she comes up with a new release and I see it talked about, I think to myself: “Well, that does sound interesting, but I’m not sure it’ll be my kind of thing”. But I’m starting to wonder if they might be exactly my kind of thing. Here’s why:
1. Kissing the Witch is brilliant, and I’ve been wanting to reread it ever since I finished it.
2. I recently saw the movie adaptation of Room (I don’t know why it took me this long) and it was also brilliant.
3. Just yesterday I turned the last page of The Pull of the Stars, Donoghue’s most recent release, and you guessed it: brilliant as well.
Taking place in wartime Dublin during just three days, The Pull of the Stars closely follows a nurse working with pregnant women infected by the influenza. Yes, there’s a pandemic AND a war going on, so the atmosphere is quite intense. But I think that makes for an extremely interesting setting.
In terms of the prose, Donoghue has this skill of merging detailed descriptions with pieces of dialogue seamlessly, with no need for speech marks. It took a while to get used to the style of writing but once I did, I had to drag myself from reading.
I would highly recommend The Pull of the Stars for fans of Call the Midwife. For ones that aren’t taken aback by some gore and the messy, dangerous business of giving birth. And for ones that are okay with escaping our modern pandemic world to one plagued by another disease. Although if that last point makes you want to push picking this up for the time being, I completely understand.
“But wasn’t it the whole world’s war now? Hadn’t we caught it from each other, as helpless against it as against other infections? No way to keep one’s distance; no island to hide on. Like the poor, maybe, the war would always be with us. Across the world, one lasting state of noise and terror under the bone man’s reign.”
The thing is, I read Kissing the Witch, a collection of feminist fairytale retellings, years ago and fell in love with Donoghue’s prose, yet every time she comes up with a new release and I see it talked about, I think to myself: “Well, that does sound interesting, but I’m not sure it’ll be my kind of thing”. But I’m starting to wonder if they might be exactly my kind of thing. Here’s why:
1. Kissing the Witch is brilliant, and I’ve been wanting to reread it ever since I finished it.
2. I recently saw the movie adaptation of Room (I don’t know why it took me this long) and it was also brilliant.
3. Just yesterday I turned the last page of The Pull of the Stars, Donoghue’s most recent release, and you guessed it: brilliant as well.
Taking place in wartime Dublin during just three days, The Pull of the Stars closely follows a nurse working with pregnant women infected by the influenza. Yes, there’s a pandemic AND a war going on, so the atmosphere is quite intense. But I think that makes for an extremely interesting setting.
In terms of the prose, Donoghue has this skill of merging detailed descriptions with pieces of dialogue seamlessly, with no need for speech marks. It took a while to get used to the style of writing but once I did, I had to drag myself from reading.
I would highly recommend The Pull of the Stars for fans of Call the Midwife. For ones that aren’t taken aback by some gore and the messy, dangerous business of giving birth. And for ones that are okay with escaping our modern pandemic world to one plagued by another disease. Although if that last point makes you want to push picking this up for the time being, I completely understand.
“But wasn’t it the whole world’s war now? Hadn’t we caught it from each other, as helpless against it as against other infections? No way to keep one’s distance; no island to hide on. Like the poor, maybe, the war would always be with us. Across the world, one lasting state of noise and terror under the bone man’s reign.”