This medical drama was intense and compelling -- love, loss, hope, and resilience when a viral pandemic wreaks havoc on the work and personal lives of a group of women physicians who have been best friends since medical school.
I absolutely could not put this book down and read it over a couple of hours yesterday. When I finished, I was completely wrung out and totally satisfied. I am sorry to report that everyone I know will be inundated with my continual recommendation to get this book and to read it.
The characters were so well-drawn and I loved them all. Their personalities leapt off the pages and their different voices gave such depth to their experiences during the pandemic described. All of the women are physicians with varying medical specialties and each has her own story to tell so the point of view shifts. I really liked that the author lists their names, where they live, and each woman's type of practice at the beginning of the book so you can refer to it if it is hard to keep them straight.
Yes, this novel contains a lot of medical jargon and detail. I'm an RN and come from a family with many who work in the health care field, but I think Kimmery Martin, herself a physician, did an excellent job of making everything understandable so that all the science was easy to comprehend. The virus causing the pandemic in this book is not Covid-19, and the author wrote this before the real one struck our world, but there are some eerie similarities that parallel what has happened to us all over the last year and a half. Perhaps you are not quite ready to go back to the beginning or to re-experience the uncertainty, pain, and panic of Covid, however the artiovirus in this story is just a bit worse.
This author was new to me, but I note that she has written 2 other books that feature some of the same characters in this one so I plan to get those shortly. I think this would make an excellent choice for a book club, especially to help us all understand everything that we have been through and also to remind us that there have been many heroes during our own trials, particularly the health care workers and scientists who did so much with so little.
Thank you to NetGalley and Berkley Publishing Company for this e-book ARC to read, review, and highly recommend. I rarely give fiction 5 stars, but this might just be my favorite book this year.
This is a standalone, however it has characters that were featured in two other books by this author.
Genre - medical drama, pandemic
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