The author wastes no time dropping the reader right into the heart of St. Marylebone Infirmary, as the staff deals with both shell-shocked soldiers from the last vestiges of WWI and a new, deadly disease.
It doesn’t take a great knowledge of history (only a simple reading of blurbs, or any newspaper lately) to know that the deadly disease is the Spanish Flu.
It also goes without saying that it is quite natural to draw parallels to the current world situation and what is described in this book.
I’m not going to try to NOT get political in this review. But I will say a major difference is that the science and medicine of the time was not advanced enough to be able to handle the pandemic. That’s quite the contrast from today’s pandemic.
Plus, they didn’t have to deal with the media and politicians who had ulterior motives.
But I digress.
As with any disease, things move quickly, and the workers of St. Marylebone are left continuously playing catch-up. This worsens when the workers themselves begin to fall ill.
The author keeps the pace of the action moving, and I think that would be my one (minor) complaint. Things seemed to skim along quickly, characters are introduced, events occur…all at a rapid pace.
I think a little bit more time spent on the characters and how they are each personally affected could have added to the story and made things even a little more relatable.
That being said, it’s possible that the author did not want to have a lot of parallels to the present and made a conscious effort to keep things moving so fast that there wasn’t time to think about comparisons.
On that front, I commend the author. I think she also did a good job of not allowing current perceptions to color the characters and efforts of the past. Hindsight being 20/20 and all….
I did like how the characters related to each other, and it was obvious that author did the necessary homework to convey the horror of shell shock and the uncertainty brought about by the pandemic.
I would still recommend this book to any historical fiction fan. Do yourself a favor, though, and read it “as is” – lose yourself in the past and don’t try to compare it to now. You’ll find it much more enjoyable.
Author Bio:
A change in circumstance meant Kate Eastham made the shift from a career in nursing to being a carer for her partner. Determined to make the most of this new role ‘working from home’ and inspired by an in-depth study of the origins of nursing, she wrote her first novel at the kitchen table. Miss Nightingale’s Nurses was published by Penguin in 2018, closely followed by three more in the series. With her passion for history, Kate aims to make visible the lives of ordinary yet extraordinary women from the past.
Her current historical fiction is set during the World Wars and will be published by Bookouture.
