HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Readers ardently pursue every book by Donoghue, but the prescient pandemic theme and valiant nurse protagonist in her powerful latest will increase interest exponentially.
A fascinating read in these difficult times. The city is ravaged by the war and the Spanish flu, referred to as grippe. In Red, midwife Julia goes to work at a Dublin hospital on October 31st 1918.
Donoghue ( Akin, 2019) offers vivid characters and a gripping portrait of a world beset by a pandemic and political uncertainty. Donoghue divides the novel into four sections: Red, Brown, Blue, and Black which depict three days in the life of narrator, Julia Power. These two women will change everything Julia thought she knew about life, nursing, politics, and love. Lynn, a firebrand indicted in the Irish uprising who was released to help in the overcrowded hospital. She is on the front line in what had been seen as a golden age of medicine conquering maladies from anthrax to malaria but is now no match for the disease “beating us hollow.” In the tumult of influenza and the post–WWI era, she meets two extraordinary women: a sprite of a helper, Bridie Sweeney, a young woman well acquainted with the battle to survive poverty, and the indomitable Dr.
At work, Julia laments the extra cots jammed into wards and dire newspaper headlines. Turning 30, Julia is unbothered by the prospects of never marrying, focusing her concern instead on the prospects of recovery for her brother, Tim, back from the war with no physical wounds but deeply wounded, nonetheless. Julia Powell, a dedicated nurse at a Dublin hospital in 1918, pours her energy into caring for patients in the women’s fever ward, tending to pregnant women struggling to both give birth and fight off the flu.
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