Pull of the Stars (Donoghue) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Don’t believe history repeats itself? Read this book… an arresting new page turner of a novel…. [The Pull of the Stars] takes place almost entirely in a single room and unfolds at the pace of a thriller.
Karen Thompson Walker - New York Times


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.… As in her best-known work, the deservedly mega selling Room, Donoghue infuses catastrophic circumstances with an infectious—but by no means blind—faith in human compassion, endurance and resilience.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post


The Pull of the Stars moves with the quickness of a thriller.… Donoghue has pulled off another feat: She wrote a book about a 100-year-old flu that feels completely current, down to the same frustrations and tensions and hopes and dangers. And she did it without even knowing just how relevant it would be—how well and frighteningly her own reimagining of a historical catastrophe would square with our actual living experience of its modern sequel.
Carolyn Kellogg - Los Angeles Times


In doing a deep dive into the miseries and terrors of the past, Donoghue presciently anticipated the miseries and terrors of our present.… A deft, lyrical and sometimes even cheeky writer… she’s given us our first pandemic caregiver novel—an engrossing and inadvertently topical story about health care workers inside small rooms fighting to preserve life.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR


With an urgency that brilliantly captures the high-stakes horror and exhilaration of life on a pandemic’s front lines, the Room author centers her latest spine-tingler on a maternity ward nurse charged with keeping new mothers—and herself—safe as the 1918 Great Flu sweeps Ireland.
Oprah Magazine


Echoes of our current catastrophe abound—social distancing and confusing messaging among them—but the heroine copes with so many turn-of-the-century medical horrors that you’ll hardly remember you’re reading a pandemic novel in the first place.
Entertainment Weekly


[S]earing…. While the novel’s characters and plot feel thinner than the best of the author’s remarkable oeuvre, her blunt prose and… evocation of the 1918 flu, and the valor it demands of health-care workers, will stay with readers.
Publishers Weekly


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.
Booklist


(Starred review) [This is] 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.
Kirkus Reviews