She’s just so real and relatable to me, especially with the subtle but continuous toying with whether she should be stressed about turning thirty or whether that was okay (not that I’m turning thirty yet but still, getting older and being single/childless feels like a TIME PRESSURE PEOPLE). If I bumped into Julia on my way to work one morning, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Donoghue has woven these characters to life with words in a way I never thought possible. I feel intimately familiar with all their mannerisms and who they are as people. I could not work out for the life of me why, at 50% through, when the story had gone no further than one day on the maternity ward, what was so damn interesting and addictive about it? BUT OH BOY – have you ever watched Call the Midwife? And you just can’t stop watching? The horror! The joy! The stress! The excitement! All heightened in the setting of a war and a global pandemic.īut secondly, the characters of Julia and Bridie were incredible. It is quite literally impossible to put down and not a particularly long book either: I found myself finishing this within a small number of sittings.įirstly, for the pace of the plot and how interesting it was. We follow her journey as she does her best to manage all the curveballs that tricky pregnancies throw her way. With the story only spanning a few days, a lot of detail is poured into the character development of Julia and individual cases that come into her ward. The story is gripping, realistic, terrifying and harrowingly relatable to our current situation. When the nurse in charge (yes there is an official term for that but shhh) takes ill, it’s up to Julia to roll up her sleeves and try to manage all the trials of the maternity ward alone, until a volunteer called Bridie is recruited in to help her. Julia is taking care of the influenza maternity ward (pregnant women who also have the flu). She lives with her brother, Tim, who was injured fighting in the war and is now a mute. It follows a (nearly) thirty-year-old woman called Julia who lives in Dublin and works in the hospital as a nurse. This story is set in 1918 during the height of the Spanish Flu.

This was simply brilliant, what else can I say. I couldn’t stop reading this even though the scope of the plot is quite small, spanning only a handful of days in a maternity ward. This is my first Donoghue book and oh my god I feel like I’m re-entering the world for the first time since I picked this up.

This blew me away?!? I can’t even work out why this was so brilliant?! I’m seriously amazed. Thank you Picador (Pan Macmillan) for providing me a copy of this in exchange for an honest review!

The pull of the stars review