... [an] arresting new page-turner of a novel ... Readers familiar with Donoghue’s masterly 2010 best seller, Room, will recall the focused intensity she can bring to bear on constricted spaces ... unfolds at the pace of a thriller ... The narrow aperture of the maternity ward allows Donoghue to focus on one of the novel’s most compelling preoccupations: the lives and bodies of women ... Even in Julia’s slightly euphemistic voice, the sheer attention devoted to these descriptions functions as a kind of unadorned reverence for the work and pain and strength of women — and how the paths of their lives are so often defined by the workings of their bodies ... The scenes in the 'fever/maternity' ward are so enthralling that the novel loses a bit of its fire — and realism — whenever it leaves that room, but these departures are thankfully rare. Donoghue seems most interested in the dramas of this one space — with which she manages to make clear the broader constrictions and injustices of an entire Irish society ... affecting.
...a drama of drudgery, solicitude, alarms and obstetrics ... almost ludicrously timely – and engrossing ... at once harrowing and heartening ... The events of The Pull of the Stars are mostly confined to Julia’s makeshift maternity ward and unfold over a period of just three days, in the course of which much emotion and activity is generated. The brief timespan makes for succinctness and intimacy ... Once again – following on from her earlier books...Emma Donoghue takes the stuff of a newspaper headline as a starting point, and expands and transforms its core element into an original and arresting work of fiction.
... the pandemic is simply a backdrop for Donoghue’s searing portrait of women’s lives scarred by poverty and too many pregnancies in a society that proclaims ... From these dark materials, Donoghue has fashioned a tale of heroism that reads like a thriller, complete with gripping action sequences, mortal menaces and triumphs all the more exhilarating for being rare and hard-fought ... Many novels depict the brotherhood of men at war. Donoghue celebrates the sisterhood of women bringing life into the world and those who help them along this perilous journey. ... The Pull of the Stars closes with a final surge of plain-spoken poetry.
Donoghue ensures that her reader feels Julia’s pain. We despair at her patients’ naiveté...and are profoundly moved by tragic cases of poverty, hardship and cruelty ... Although there is much suffering in this novel, there are also many glimmers of light representing hope, unexpected love and Julia’s medical triumphs. These operations constitute stunning set pieces imbued with drama, tension and rare emotional force ... This intense and intimate novel unfolds over three days. But we would gladly spend longer with Julia, watching her in awe as she grapples with life and death in her 'small square of the sickened, war-weary world.'
A defining strength in Emma Donoghue’s work is narrative voice, and here it is as strong and compelling as Jack in Room and Lib in The Wonder. ... the blooming friendship and admiration between the two young women lifts an otherwise necessarily grim account of suffering and deprivation ... There is nothing cheerful about the situation, and so the novel depends on the voices and relationships of its three central women. They are all – as one would expect from Donoghue – complex, well-developed characters with distinctive voices and lives based on thorough research, vivid in ways that only excellent writing can offer. I found this novel admirable right up to the final chapters, when it veers into a disappointing cliche. I’m trying not to spoil anything, but if you’d like a haunting and finely balanced literary novel in which the plot isn’t suddenly taken over by depressing convention, stop 20 pages before the end.
Donoghue masterfully conjures a suffocating space, this time the glorified closet where Julia helps women give birth ... The timeliness of Donoghue’s premise proves more than a gimmick. Her analysis of how pandemics place an undue burden on women resonates in today’s crisis ... Donoghue’s book recounts a frightening history we must not repeat ... (Donoghue clearly reveled in her research on early 20th century medicine. This novel is not for the squeamish.) ... The characters themselves in The Pull of the Stars are thinner than those in some of Donoghue’s past books, but the nonstop action of the maternity ward is so compelling that it hardly matters ... the entire narrative feels like a flu—induced dream—a prophetic one we should all heed, lest we slip back in time.
If there is a way forward for the pandemic novel, it may be in these claustrophobic settings that Donoghue maps out, where too much dying and too much loving press together in a tight space ... The most vivid stories in this novel leave their traces on the body, rather than the history books—a bruised wrist, a scarred arm, a swollen leg ... unmistakably a war novel, but the battles take place on the engorged and furrowed flesh of the women themselves ... Donoghue is an important writer for this moment. She has the unique ability to make visceral our fears around childbirth and childrearing and to create gothic scenes of maternal claustrophobia in which those fears are realized. Her approach could be defined, for lack of a better word, as contraction: the narrowing and intensifying of the world. Here, in the kind of cramped spaces where readers now find themselves, is where Donoghue is at her best, creating an atmosphere of containment where enclosure is both comforting and terrifying at once—much like motherhood itself.
At first distrustful of her 'unqualified' and 'uneducated' new helper, Nurse Power and Bridie quickly get along like cogs, forming a symbiotic relationship that is a pleasure to read ... I am somewhat weary of Donoghue’s version of Dr Lynn in the novel. One of the most discussed aspects of her life was her decades-long lesbian relationship with Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, both of whom went on to found St Ultan’s Children’s Hospital in Dublin the year after the novel’s events. While the novel does progress into queerness, none of it is displayed by Dr Lynn, nor is her queerness ever really hinted at ... However, I must admit that Donoghue does deliver with The Pull of the Stars. While the final part is abrupt and clumsily plotted (I question the fast-tracked editing process the novel must have undergone in order to accommodate its early release), Donoghue’s narrative of a nurse in the midst of a pandemic is enticingly written with the not-a-minute-to-waste pace of Dr Lynn.
... thinly plotted but moving ... In spare prose, Donoghue documents Julia’s harrowing three days ... The book’s most touching sequences dramatize the budding friendship between Julia and Bridie Sweeney ... The Pull of the Stars confronts a reality as pertinent today as it was in 1918 Ireland ... a plea for an end to the inequality that pandemics make all the more stark.
The Pull of The Stars beautifully does what good fiction borrowing from history can do: it allows us to look indirectly at our present, painful circumstances and know, with some relief, that we are perhaps not in such unprecedented times as we may believe ... Over several extended passages, she meticulously describes the challenging medical complications that Julia confronts and the procedures she heroically performs. All of the novel’s action happens within the confines of the tiny maternity ward—a whole world unto itself—confirming Donoghue’s mastery of seemingly small interior scenes packed with granular detail, powerful momentum, and plenty of suspense.
... for the most part, The Pull of the Stars is a beautifully modulated historical novel. There is also the comfort – for most of us – of how much more likely we all are to survive the current emergency than anyone on the 1918 Dublin maternity fever ward, the setting for Donoghue’s 13th novel. For a small cast, the death count here is high ... Donoghue’s prose is visceral, and the sense of peril in the cramped, tiny ward is compelling ... Donoghue has abandoned quotation marks in this book. She has said she wanted to give the dialogue a 'hallucinatory effect', and it certainly conjures up Nurse Power’s exhaustion ... Where the novel falls down is in Donoghue’s weakness for lurid melodrama...Donoghue appears at pains to ensure the reader never forgets about grief and suffering ... The effect of so much blood and guts is quite deadening, and lessens the impact of the final tragedy in the book. There is also a subplot featuring a doctor on the run from police, but this fails to really go anywhere ... This feels like a wasted opportunity, given that Donoghue is such a capable writer ... It is this ability of Donoghue’s to conjure a whole world in a short phrase that makes the book worth reading; one only wishes she could occasionally have exercised a little more restraint.
If you’re squeamish, look away now. In fact, avoid this book like the plague. Never have I read in such visceral detail about how foul and terrifying childbirth, illness and death can be. Not to mention the awful tragedy of stillbirth. Midwives will appreciate Julia’s technical skill at dealing with prolapses, perineums and poo, but for mere mortals it’s hard to stomach. Those who make it as far as the lively post-mortem scene will be rewarded with yet more medical realism ... If all that doesn’t make you feel sick, the lot of the early 20th-century Irishwomen will. Donoghue shows us a patriarchal Catholicism that demands as many babies as possible, but treats unmarried mothers like devils; the emotional and physical harm that urban poverty allows to flourish; rampant sexism everywhere; and a generation of brothers and fathers killed in battle. Julia, who has her own shell-shocked brother at home, carries the story with the affecting first-person immediacy that Donoghue is known for, and reminds us what an admirable and strange vocation nursing is ... an immersive, unforgettable fever-dream of a novel. It’s almost pathological in the way it infects you, pushes you to your limits and then drops you back in to real life feeling bruised and slightly wonky, but mostly just so grateful for the work that nurses do.
Donoghue...offers vivid characters and a gripping portrait of a world beset by a pandemic and political uncertainty. A fascinating read in these difficult times ... Readers ardently pursue every book by Donoghue, but the prescient pandemic theme and valiant nurse protagonist in her powerful latest will increase interest exponentially.
Donoghue’s searing tale...takes readers to a Dublin beleaguered by wartime shortages and ravaged by a lethal new strain of influenza ... While the novel’s characters and plot feel thinner than the best of the author’s remarkable oeuvre, her blunt prose and detailed, painstakingly researched medical descriptions do full justice to the reality of the pandemic and the poverty that helps fuel it. Donoghue’s evocation of the 1918 flu, and the valor it demands of health-care workers, will stay with readers.
Donoghue isn’t a showy writer, but her prose sings with blunt poetry ... [Bridie and Julia's] 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...
