The Pull of the Stars

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Donoghue does such a remarkable job of creating feelings and emotions by simply relating unrelenting detail of life. She did it in Room and she does it here. At first I was a little exasperated at the chunk of text without chapter or other breaks but soon saw the sheer relentlessness of the page as a brilliant device--the lack of quotation marks was another great choice as the whole narration becomes a sort of fever dream. When the first break happened a third way into the book I felt like I had been completely immersed in Julia's world (and mind). Also like Room I felt like some of the intensity was lost in the second half of the novel. I felt like some of it became repetitive and the love story seemed to come out of nowhere--the same feelings could have been produced without introducing the romantic element, in my opinion. So interesting that Donoghue started writing this before COVID and how so many of the same elements played out in both pandemics. (We thought we were so unique...)

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