In the novel, the expectant mothers have very different family situations and relations and relationships with their children. What did you think about the detailed scenes that depicted childbirth and its complications? How do you think birth functions as a source of plot compared with the flu?Ħ. Julia argues that women pay “the blood tax” just as much as soldiers. What effect do these distant conflicts have on the story and atmosphere of the novel? Why is war kept mostly in the background rather than in the foreground?ĥ. Lynn is a leader–is the context to The Pull of Stars. War in several senses–the First World War in which Tim Power served, and the Irish revolutionary struggle in which Dr. Why do you think Emma Donoghue included them in the novel? Were your government’s efforts to communicate with the general public during the coronavirus pandemic similar to those in the novel, or different?Ĥ. Throughout The Pull of the Stars, Julia notices government placards with public health warnings and advice. Which of those challenges were unique to Julia’s time and place? To what extent do our health-care workers face the same challenges today?ģ. Julia and the other health workers face many challenges, including lack of supplies, misinformation, and sexism. What was your awareness of the 1918 flu before the 2020 pandemic? How important is an understanding of history when we deal with similar crises in the present?Ģ. During the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, many people referred to the 1918 Spanish flu as a touchpoint. As a result, the entire narrative feels like a flu-induced dream-a prophetic one we should all heed, lest we slip back in time.1.

She omits quotation marks from dialogue so that spoken words drift in between thoughts. 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. Women have been paying the blood tax since time began.” Ought you really get a say in the affairs of the United Kingdom unless you’re prepared to lay down your lives for the king?” Julia shoots back, “Look around you … This is where every nation draws its first breath. An orderly dismisses the idea of women’s right to vote: “Don’t pay the blood tax, though, do you? Not like we fellows do. This novel is not for the squeamish.)ĭonoghue emphasizes parallels between the women suffering in hospitals and their husbands and brothers suffering in the trenches. (Donoghue clearly reveled in her research on early 20th century medicine. The sickening prospect of a doctor sawing through a patient’s pubic bones during a delivery hangs over each woman who enters the ward. Lynn, their priorities lie with ensuring their patients’ abilities to bear more children, often at the expense of the health of women. On the rare occasions when male doctors do appear, away from the watchful eye of Dr.

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue