women’s lives

O Caledonia, by Elspeth Barker

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You think you know where you are when this novel begins. “Halfway up the great stone staircase which rises from the dim and vaulting hall of Auchnasaugh there is a tall stained-glass window.” At night, the moon shines through the dying cockatoo in the window and

casts his blood drops in a chain of rubies onto the flagstones of the hall. Here it was that Janet was found, oddly attired in her mother’s black lace evening dress, twisted and slumped in bloody, murderous death.

But this is no ordinary murder mystery. Who killed sixteen-year-old Janet hardly matters. Instead, we are taken back to Janet’s birth in the 1940s, the first of five children and the least-loved.

Her life makes for a dark and sometimes funny tale of isolation and misadventure. Unlike her siblings, Janet never quite grasps the social rules. She makes disastrous mistakes, and other times acts upon what seem like logical ideas, such as burying the new baby in earth and leaves.

It was a rigorous life, but for Janet it was softened by the landscape, by reading, and by animals whom she found it possible to love without qualification. People seemed to her flawed and cruel.

The only sympathetic person is her strange, older Cousin Lila, who lives at Auchnasaugh, sipping whisky and smoking all day. Like Janet, she prefers animals to people. The whole family is pretty eccentric, but Lila outdoes them all.

Auchnasaugh, the field of sighing, took its name from the winds which lamented around it almost all the year, sometimes moaning softly, filtered through swathes of pine groves, more often malign, shrieking over the battlements and booming down the chimneys, so that the furnace which fed the ancient central heating system roared up and the pipes shuddered and the Aga top glowed infernal red.

I couldn’t help feeling for Janet as a victim of the stereotypes and restrictions around being a woman in postwar Calvinist Scotland. Whether it’s the expectation that girls will be prim and proper—and obedient—or the insistence that the only life for a woman is marriage and children, Janet simply doesn’t measure up.

No wonder she finds herself an outsider, not only at home but also at school and church. Janet is so much an outsider to her family that they bury her in a different graveyard, so they won’t be plagued with her in the afterlife. Only her pet jackdaw mourns for her.

The title comes from the epigraph, a quote from Sir Walter Scott. Caledonia is the Roman name for the part of Scotland where Janet lives, the part that remained outside Roman jurisdiction. Stern, wild, poetic: It fits Janet’s story. So too does the surprising and shocking cover.

When I finished the book, I turned back to the beginning and read it again. Mostly I wanted to savor the unusual yet precise prose.

Janet began to hate the sea. There was so much of it, flowing, counter-flowing, entering other seas, slyly furthering its interests beyond the mind’s reckoning; no wonder it could pass itself off as sky; it was infinite, a voracious marine confederacy.

I want to keep quoting huge chunks of this book. In her introduction, Maggie O’Farrell says that when she used to teach creative writing, she would read aloud the opening chapters, emphasising Barker’s word choice, imagery, and sentence structure. First published in 1991, O Caledonia was republished in 2022 with O’Farrell’s introduction.

Dark yet funny, realistic yet fantastical: This haunting book is a perfect October read.

Can you suggest another perfect October read?

The Loving, by Rena Gerhard

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Rena Gerhard began writing poetry as a child in the 1940s. Later, many of her poems were published in Musings, the poetry column in her local newspaper, The Reading Eagle. She continued to write until her death in 2014. Now her son and fellow poet Fred Gerhard has issued a selection of her work from all these phases of her life.

With such a breadth of time, the reader can see how her style developed as she matured while also recognising how she retained the elegant simplicity and emotional impact of her earlier work. Some consistent themes emerge.

Many of the poems are suffused with her love of nature and its rhythms, such as in “Night Walk” in which she describes a maple tree as “sleeping standing up / Having dreamed her children / to the wind.”

Alive to the magic of childhood, she speaks of the moon in “Midnight Forest.”

That whispering sigh above your head,

Know you what it means?

A rustling leaf—long brown and dead

Or th’ song of Fairy Queens.

Other poems are drawn from daily life, such as “Supper Will Be Late.” Or “Mystery” whose two lines capture a moment we can identify with: “Don’t you just hate when you clean out a drawer / And not all things fit that fit before!” The humor here can be found in many of the poems. One of my favorites is “Dancers” which begins:

Dinosaurs dance sedately.

Because of their weight and their delicate toes,

Their walnut-sized brains and their clattering clothes,

Dinosaurs dance sedately.

Subsequent stanzas continue the fun. As a dancer myself, I perk up every time she refers to dancing in a poem. When you take to the floor and begin moving to the music, you have to feel the rhythm in your body. Rena’s dance experience is evident in the confident rhythms she chooses for her poems.

Her imagery, too, is surprising and fresh, such as when she describes a light snow as “heirloom lace” spread over a “tablecloth world.” She continues the motif with “Finest stitch of sparrow hops / link bush to branch to porch to perch”  and “Squirrel-leap and rabbit dart / basting stitch the path of paws.”

You can see her love of words in poems like “Absurd” where she says, “What a wonderful word! / A laugh that bursts / Like water balloons.”

Although I never met Rena, I feel I have a sense of her based on her humor and love of nature as well as her sure handling of concision and emotion in these poems. In “Poem to  Old Writings” she looks back over her life and is grateful to be reminded of who she used to be and whom she has become. I’m grateful to her son for sharing these poems.

Have you ever looked at a poet’s collected work and considered what has changed over time and what has stayed the same?

The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans

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Sitting alone in her Baltimore home, 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp communicates with the world primarily through letters, the kind you put in envelopes and mail. This novel consists exclusively of her letters to and from friends, family, public figures she admires, and others she has, as my Baltimore mother used to say, a bone to pick with.

I was initially skeptical, as was at least one other person in my book club, that a collection of letters could amount to a novel worthy of the effusive praise this one has earned. Every book club I know is reading it. I’ve read other epistolary novels, and they’re okay but not as good as a traditional novel in my opinion. This one is.

First of all, Sybil fascinates me. She’s a complicated woman. Acerbic and prickly she may be, but as a retired lawyer she values words and enjoys living alone. The letters constitute a protective covering, allowing her to communicate with others while maintaining strict control over her privacy. At the same time, she is writing letters to an unnamed recipient that are never sent, and these reveal what she is really thinking.

Second, unlikely as it may sound, her quiet life whips up enough tension and suspense to make the reader not want to look away for a second. Not only are Sybil’s health and eyesight beginning to fail, not only does she long to heal the rifts in her relationship with her two children, but suddenly the world is more with her than she expected. A surprising friendship with a neighbor, Theodore Lübeck, upsets her solitude, as does a brash Texan with romance on his mind.

Events accelerate. She is asked to be responsible for a child and to heal her relationship with her ex-husband. A stalker sends her threatening letters. Regrets about her past coldness to others pile up. Members of my book club couldn’t stop reading. We loved all the humor and human interest. Also, being based in Baltimore, we appreciated the local settings and all the literary references. Sybil is a reader like us!

We also praised the author’s writerly skills. The order of the letters is nicely balanced between recipients to show different sides of Sybil’s character, and arranged in such a way that they keep us waiting and wondering about the outcome of a particular exchange for just the right amount of time, i.e., we remained interested without being annoyed. Also, I thought the unsent letters a masterful solution to the need to show her inner thoughts.

A few members complained that some of the story lines had unrealistic, “Pollyanna-ish” endings. I don’t disagree. At the same time, I think the author did a good job of portraying a woman contemplating the end of her life and trying to come to terms with her regrets, guilt, and failures over the course of her life.

Some of us went out and bought stationery and plan to write some real letters. We talked about how much value we have found in reading collections of letters and how biographers rely on them. We wondered what will happen in the future, since almost no one writes letters anymore. Our emails and texts seem both permanent and ephemeral. In the future, will anyone publish collections of emails, or will that sense of everyday life be lost?

When was the last time you wrote a letter to someone, not an email or text, but a physical letter?

Ocean State, by Stewart O’Nan

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Sometimes an author writes about a place or time or circumstance that so accurately reflects a slice of your experience that reading their work feels like coming home. Their people are your people, so familiar, so themselves. Stewart O’Nan’s novels are like that for me.

At its heart, this story set in Ashaway, Rhode Island, in 2009 is about four women. Three of them are a constellation, a solid triangle: overweight and overlooked Marie, her older sister Angel—the beautiful one, the popular one—and their divorced mother Carol. Angel’s classmate Birdy is the fourth woman, with her own sister and mother. Birdy’s family is of Portuguese heritage, as so many people in that area are. Through these four women’s voices, the author takes us deep into their lives.

My library attaches a little comment form inside the back cover of novels so patrons can rate the book. On it, one person wrote that the characters were interesting but there was no plot. There is indeed a plot, though an unusual one: A reverse-chronology story starts with the ending and then proceeds to take us there. It’s hard to do in a way that doesn’t feel manipulative, but O’Nan succeeds, beginning the story with Marie’s earnest and honest voice.

When I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl. She was in love, my mother said, like it was an excuse. She didn’t know what she was doing. I had never been in love then, not really, so I didn’t know what my mother meant, but I do now.

Both Angel and Birdy are fully and irrevocably in love with their classmate Myles. Angel and Myles have been together for three years, a legendary couple at their school, even though his well-to-do parents don’t approve of her. But he’s started seeing Birdy secretly as well, another triangle. We don’t learn much about Myles—he seems to be one of Gatsby’s careless people—but it’s not his story. Here’s Birdy leaving to meet him.

“I’m leaving,” she calls.

With a scraping her mother gets up from her chair and comes to see her off, tottering on her bad knees, the good water glasses inside the hutch tinkling as she crosses the dining room. Her mother is the wisest person she knows, attuned to the whole family’s moods. She knew Josefina was pregnant with Luz before Josephina did. Now Birdy’s sure she can tell, and hugs her too tightly, makes a show of taking her stupid visor from its peg. Everything she does is a lie.

They are all stuck in their places in this remote corner of the tiniest state in the country, in a mill-town where the mills have closed. The houses are wonderfully described, from the expensive beachfront mansion belonging to Myles’s parents where he takes his women for privacy, to the tumble-down house where Carol and her daughters live, across the road from the abandoned mill where her parents once worked. Marie says:

We weren’t happy that fall, in that rotting, underwater house, with everything we’d already lost, and everything still to come, but lying safe and warm under my grandmother’s afghan, eating popcorn and stealing glances at my funny, beautiful sister as the light played over her face, I wished we could stay there forever.

The bigger story is of people with—really—such modest dreams, whose lives are constricted by an economy and a society that offer little hope of achieving them. Carol wants a better life for her daughters, better than her job as an aide at a home for the elderly or Angel’s after-school work at CVS. Carol’s only plan to achieve that is to find a man, but her daughters call each new boyfriend a loser. Their father, too, is stuck. He comes around now and then to fix things and takes his daughters every other weekend to stay in his apartment over a Chinese restaurant.

I love O’Nan’s tenderness towards his characters, and I’m amazed by how accurately he summons the voices of these four women. Each page is sprinkled with little surprises: jolts of familiarity and unexpected insight. They combine with the compelling story to lure me on and on, even though I’ve been warned from the beginning that it will end in tragedy.

What novel have you read that feels like coming home?

Parnassus on Wheels, by Christopher Morley

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When I was in Madrid in the 1990s, walking the streets in the evening, I glanced down a short, dead-end alley and was astonished by what I saw. Earlier in the day I’d visited the book stalls lining the Cuesta de Moyano, a small pedestrian street by El Retiro Park, and thought myself in heaven. So many books! So many book lovers!

Now, though, in that dim alley, I saw a young man grasp the bottom of a wooden board hanging on the stone wall and lift it to reveal shelves of  books. He propped the board up to be an awning and was ready for business.

Not only was I charmed by this unexpected bookshop and wished I could change places with him—what a life that would be!—but I was also reminded of a story I’d read twenty-some years earlier. In it a man had made a horse-drawn wagon, something like a Romany vardo, with sides that opened to reveal shelves of books. He traveled about the countryside selling books to farmers and townsfolk and “evangelizing” about the delights of reading.

Published in 1917, Morley’s novella is about Helen, a former governess who cooks and keeps house for her bachelor brother Andrew on their farm. Ever since Andrew started writing books and unexpectedly became famous, she’s become disenchanted with her life, left alone on the farm while he travels about giving readings and looking for inspiration.

Then one day Roger Mifflin drives his traveling bookshop into their farmyard. A short, balding man with a red beard, he has a gift for holding forth on the wonders of books and life on the road. However, he’s now decided to retire and sell his creation, and he thinks Andrew is just the person to take his place.

So does Helen. Foreseeing many more months of being left to tend the farm alone, she takes the remarkable step of buying the Traveling Parnassus herself. Though only 39 and a self-described “fat old woman,” she’s inspired to kick over the traces and set out on a bookselling trip herself.

They decide that she’ll drive Roger to the train station which will take a few days, and along the way he’ll tutor her in the business. As she and Roger travel the New England country roads, adventures ensue.

It’s been more than fifty years since I first read this delightful, old-fashioned story. I’d forgotten the details of those adventures, but I’ve never forgotten Roger’s joyous literary orations or the Traveling Parnassus itself. I’ve never forgotten my dream of a life surrounded by books and sharing them with others.

If you’re looking for something that reminds you of the joy that life holds, The Parnassus on Wheels is a great place to start.

Have you reread a book from your youth and found it better than ever? Did it change your life?

The Quiet Librarian, by Allen Eskens

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Hana Babić is at work in the stacks of her library in Minnesota when she is approached by Detective David Claypool. He tells her that her best friend Amina is dead, possibly murdered, in a fall from her balcony.

I expected Hana to be shocked and saddened by the news, and she is. What I didn’t expect was for her to immediately become tense and guarded.

Claypool came to Hana because he is investigating Amina’s death, and her will names Hana as the guardian for her young grandson Dylan. Hana responds by stating that there is no way Amina committed suicide. Her firm convictions and thoughts reveal her to be something more than the modest, self-effacing woman her colleagues call “the sweater lady” because of her cardigans.

It turns out that Hana originally lived in Bosnia as Nura Divjak. At the start of the war, 17-year-old Nura vows to find and kill the Serbs who raped her mother and murdered her family. Eventually she joins a militia as a warrior and spy. She’s so feared by the Serbs that a legend grows up around her; they call her the Night Mora. When they put a bounty on her head, the militia help her emigrate to the U.S. with a new identity.

Now she wonders if that 30-year-old bounty is what led to Amina’s death. Amina would never have revealed Hana’s identity and whereabouts; she’d proven her ability to withstand torture back in Bosnia. Hana feels responsible and must protect Dylan as well as find her friend’s murderer.

As the tension grows, the story moves back and forth between the two time frames: Bosnia in 1995, where the details of Hana’s past emerge, and the present day in Minnesota, where she has to decide how much to reveal to Claypool and whether to help him or work independently.

I often wanted to look away, overwhelmed by the tragedies I experienced along with Hana, but I couldn’t. Such a complex and fascinating character! I just wanted to learn all I could about her and her life. The other thing that kept me reading had to do with the way the author withheld and revealed information. I would love to see his map for the book, if he had one.

Eskers also does such a good job of arranging the two storylines so that, despite their covering different places and times and events, the book feels unified. The jump between the two never felt jarring to me. However, it did seem unrealistic that a detective would reveal so much information to a stranger and potential suspect.

I came away with the song War, by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, in my head. What makes people one day turn on their neighbors and believe that they are justified in raping and killing them and stealing their property? If you avenge your family’s death by killing their murderers and then their survivors come after you, where does the cycle of revenge end?

“War . . . What is it good for?”

Have you read an absorbing historical fiction book with a dual timeline?

A Life of One’s Own, by Marion Milner

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“Perhaps if one really knew when one was happy one would know the things that were necessary in one’s life.” Marion Milner

In 1926 Marion Blackett (later Milner) set out to discover “what kinds of experience made me happy.” Although armed with a First Class Honours Degree in Psychology and working in that field lecturing and researching, the twenty-six-year-old became aware that she was dissatisfied with the life she was living.

Among the possible cures she considered were adopting the habits of her peers or the standards of her parents’ generation. She also discarded the idea of following her own reason or developing a logical argument. She says, “So I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know.”

To learn what made her happy, Marion decided to examine her own perception, that is, her senses. Instead of making “the centre of awareness in my head,” she chose “knowing with the whole of my body.” In doing so, she takes Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and expands upon it by offering a potential process for creating space in that room.

The process she chose started with keeping a diary of times she felt happy. Later she added freewriting to examine her entries further. Finally, she began writing this book, partly so she would have a record of this exploration and partly in the hope that others might find the process useful. Many of the epigraphs for the chapters come from Robinson Crusoe, echoing her deliberate isolation in this endeavour.

I wish I’d first read this book when I was young. Now that I’m well gone in years, I find myself greeting many of her discoveries and insights like old friends. For example, she found that once she started noting down when she was happy, she noticed more and more things that brought her joy, anticipating our current interest in paying attention, mindfulness and gratitude. Also, she found that being out in nature brought her joy, as did clearing out the spaces in her home.

Still, I enjoyed following the peculiar track of her mind, as she resists her temptation to control her thoughts instead of leaving them to themselves. Her prose, too, is clear and jargon-free. As someone who has kept a journal for most of my life, I also liked reading her excerpts and her thoughts about the value of her diary entries.

I also found the thoughts and preoccupations of a woman of that time interesting. The seven years she spent on this work held tumult and uncertainty, both personally and politically. During that time, the western world was roiled by the Great Depression and the run-up to World War II. She herself married Dennis Milner, had a child, and moved from Britain to the U.S.

What made me actually pick up the book, though, is that I love reading about people who shrug off society’s roles and rules in order to create their own lives from scratch. Many of us who came of age in the late 1960s and 1970s chose to reject the straitjacket of that era’s roles in order to find our own path, often without any models to guide us. In midlife I found I needed to remake my life, and again after I retired. Perhaps this effort, though most intense when we’re young adults, is one we come back to again and again.

Are you happy with your life? What might you change about it?

The Next Ship Home, by Heather Webb

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Two sisters from Sicily arrive at Ellis Island in 1902 after a nightmare ocean journey. Fleeing their abusive father, they hope to build a new life together in the U.S. However, Francesca worries that her beloved sister Maria will not pass the health exam; she has become ill in the crowded and unsanitary third-class compartment where they were confined. They might both be sent back to Sicily on the next ship.

Meanwhile Alma, a second-generation German-American, lives in a tenement in the Lower East Side’s Little Germany where her stepfather owns and runs a bierhaus in the basement. He thinks Alma is worthless and mocks her interest in learning languages spoken by their Irish and Italian neighbors. Deciding her unpaid labor in the bierhaus and home is not enough, he forces her to take a job at Ellis Island processing new arrivals telling her she must give her pay to him to help support the household.

Although Alma starts her new job filled with the prejudice against immigrants she’s learned at home, her compassion is stirred by the fear and suffering she encounters, and she gradually learns that these are just people like herself. Becoming especially close to Francesca and Maria, Alma works hard at her language skills so she can help by translating for those who don’t speak English. She also tries to find ways around the roadblocks put in place by the bureaucracy and some corrupt officials.

At first Alma doesn’t believe the whispered stories of extortion and abuse at Ellis Island—carefully researched by the author and based on real events—but Francesca has first-hand knowledge of them. The courage of two women and the growing friendship between them are inspiring.

Unlike some historical fiction that glosses over the practical details of everyday life, the author gives us a full picture of these women’s lives. I love that Webb has chosen to portray this neglected but important part of history: the corruption at Ellis Island, the mutual support of the downtrodden, and the dreams that women fight for despite the forces arrayed against them.

The story also follows Francesca after she leaves Ellis Island, providing unusual insight into this critical phase, including the hoops that new immigrants—especially women—must jump through and the traps they must avoid. I’m learning so much these days about the immigration process as I follow the news, so I appreciate the author’s depiction of the inner lives of both Francesca and Alma.

As we confront and protest against the atrocities visited upon legal immigrants in this country by a rogue regime, I found both comfort and inspiration in this story. Corruption and the abuse of immigrants have a long history in the U.S. and Webb’s portrait of the Ellis Island bureaucracy shows the range of workers, from those who actively abuse arriving immigrants to those who look the other way to those who try to help the new arrivals as best they can. At the same time, Webb shows what seemingly powerless people can accomplish by working together.

Can you recommend a fiction or nonfiction book about the history of Ellis Island?

A Good Neighborhood, by Therese Anne Fowler

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In Oak Knoll, a diverse and modest North Carolina neighborhood full of trees and ranch houses,  professor of forestry and ecology Valerie Alston-Holt is concerned about the people who’ve just moved in next door. Flush with new money, the Whitmans have ignored the character of the neighborhood and instead cleared all the trees from their plot and built a McMansion complete with in-ground pool.

Although Valerie is worried about the health of her beloved and historic oak tree, its root system disrupted by all the digging, she tries to find a way to get along with her new neighbors, inviting Ms. Whitman—Julia—to a book club meeting. Then Valerie’s bright and talented biracial son Xavier meets Julia’s teenaged daughter Juniper.

In order to shield her daughters Juniper and young Lily from the hardscrabble life she led until marrying her boss, the up-and-coming millionaire Brad Whitman, Julia had the family join an evangelical church. Juniper agreed to take the church’a purity vow in which she agreed that her virginity belongs to God and, until she marries, to his representative on earth: her stepfather Brad. Having just watched the Neflix documentary Trust Me, this vow gave me the creeps. Already Julia’s purity vow has opened her up to bullying at her new school.

Meanwhile, Xavier, a classical guitar prodigy, is off to college in the fall on a music scholarship. He has close friends to hang out and play music with. He’s had two brief relationships with classmates, but his heart wasn’t really in either. When he meets Juniper, though, he discovers the power and glory of love. And miracle of miracles: she, too, falls for him.

Fowler makes this familiar story both urgent and utterly engaging with a relatable setting, masterful pacing, and vivid characters. I like that she works against stereotypes with some characters, but wonder if she doesn’t go too far, making them either too good to be true or too evil.

What really makes the book stand out, though, is the use of the neighborhood itself to narrate the novel. They say right on the first page: “[W]e never wanted to take sides.” They come back as a chorus throughout the story, reminding me of Euripides’ plays and other Greek tragedies. Just as the main characters are changed in the course of the story, so too is the collective group.

Using the first person plural “we” as the point of view in a novel is unusual and difficult to do well. I loved Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, where he maintained that point of view until near the end of the book. Here the chorus appearing between more traditional third-person scenes adds to a sense of looming tragedy. Even more importantly, it includes the reader as part of the “we,” making us complicit in their attitudes and opinions.

What a brilliant way to work issues of class, race and women’s lives into an old story! Because of our involvement, we readers are put on the spot: What we really think it means to be a good neighbor? How can we share our community with those who may be different from us?

Fowler’s story is more important than ever during this time when resurgent racism is polluting our  society. We may not want to take sides, but standing aside while tragedy unfolds carries its own consequences.

Have you read a novel with an unusual point of view?

The Woman with the Cure, by Lynn Cullen

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Meet Dr. Dorothy Horstmann who worked tirelessly and in the face of persistent gender discrimination to stop the polio pandemic. Now mostly forgotten, polio epidemics between 1948 and 1955 paralyzed or killed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly children, around the world. President Franklin Roosevelt is the patient with whom most people are familiar.

 

Cullen brings this time period to life with searing portraits of wards filled with children in iron lungs and scientists competing against each other to be the first to find a cure. Dorothy doesn’t care about fame; fighting polio is her only concern. She freely shares what she learns with the two leading competitors—Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin—as well as with others working to end the scourge.

 

I love that biographers and historical fiction writers are bringing to light women whose essential contributions have been downplayed and forgotten while only the “great men” are credited and remembered. It’s worth noting that polio research was one of the first uses of HeLa cells which I first learned about in Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. How much we owe to Ms. Lacks! Check out the book if you’re ever looking for an example of how one person can—even unwittingly—change the world.

 

Rejected for a residency because of her gender, Dorothy applies again as D. M. Horstmann and is accepted. The first to suspect that polio travels from the gut to the blood, she is refused support needed to investigate and conduct trials. She finally gets funding years later after a male scientist proposes the same thing; meanwhile thousands of children continued to be paralyzed or died each year. Nominated for a Nobel Prize for her work, she is passed over for two men.

 

With no time for bitterness, Dorothy pushes forward. The first woman to become a full professor at the Yale School of Medicine, she travels around the world to participate in polio conferences and to study polio outbreaks, thus contributing valuable data. She is also instrumental in the Russian study that validated Albert Sabin’s successful polio vaccine, enabling it to be approved.

 

Cullen takes us behind the scenes as scientists race the clock and each other. I felt Dorothy’s despair at setbacks and her thrills at successes. The delays caused by infighting I found frustrating, thinking of the children around the world left to suffer while male scientists kept their secrets. One of the holdups was danger of human trials with children.

 

We learn that the first round of Salk’s initial vaccine (which was greeted with cheers of relief) left 164 people paralyzed and 10 dead, due to one of the suppliers cutting corners, so that their vaccines actually gave people polio. The resulting distrust of vaccines lingers to this day.

 

I’m old enough to remember those awful years, with terrified parents keeping children apart and swimming pools closed. Some of the children in my school stumped around in their leg braces, while other children never got to attend because schools couldn’t accommodate wheelchairs.

 

I vividly remember the day at school when we lined up to get our first sugar cube with the vaccine and my mother crying. Since then I’ve been a confirmed advocate of vaccinations and nothing that drug-addled creep currently in charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—who has made millions of dollars off of anti-vax activities—can say will convince me otherwise.

 

For me, the most moving scene in the book occurs in Detroit, Michigan in 1953 when Dorothy tours the Henry Ford Hospital’s polio unit with its rows of “groaning and wheezing iron lungs out from which heads stuck.” Dorothy herself had tried out one of them early on so that she’d better understand her patients and had immediately panicked.

 

On the tour, Dorothy is distracted by a little girl in a wheelchair. “With her physician’s eye, she noted that the muscles of both the child’s legs had atrophied from the hips down and were thus likely to remain permanently paralyzed.” The child is playing a board game with a grown woman in an iron lung, Mrs. Konkle, who cheerfully announces that all the children beat her at the game, even her own children when they come to visit.

 

The game is Candy Land which we played incessantly when I was little. I never knew that it was invented by a schoolteacher in California while she was in the hospital with polio. Mrs. Konkle had her husband buy it and spent her days cheering up the children in the ward with her by letting them win. Such courage!

 

Occasionally the ins and outs of such a complex, multifaceted effort became a bit tedious, and perhaps some of the side stories could have been eliminated, but it is worth pushing through to get the full story of the dedication and sacrifice, not only Dorothy’s but that of others as well, which finally brought about a cure. Of course, Dorothy—the daughter of immigrants by the way—didn’t stop there but went on to work on the rubella vaccine still used today to protect children.

 

Did you ever play Candy Land? Were you aware of its history?