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Title: The Gilded Hour
Author: Sara Donati
Narrator: Cassandra Campbell
Format: Unabridged
Length: 31 hrs and 40 mins
Language: English
Release date: 09-01-15
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 1448 votes
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Publisher's Summary:
The internationally best-selling author of Into the Wilderness makes her highly anticipated return with a remarkable epic about two female doctors in 19th-century New York and the transcendent power of courage and love.
The year is 1883, and in New York City it's a time of dizzying splendor, crushing poverty, and tremendous change. With the gravity-defying Brooklyn Bridge nearly complete and New York in the grips of antivice crusader Anthony Comstock, Anna Savard and her cousin, Sophie - both graduates of the Woman's Medical School - treat the city's most vulnerable, even if doing so may put everything they've strived for in jeopardy.
Anna's work has placed her in the path of four children who have lost everything, just as she herself once had. Faced with their helplessness, Anna must make an unexpected choice between holding on to the pain of her past and letting love into her life.
For Sophie, an obstetrician and the orphaned daughter of free people of color, helping a desperate young mother forces her to grapple with the oath she took as a doctor - and thrusts her and Anna into the orbit of Comstock, a dangerous man who considers himself the enemy of everything indecent and of anyone who dares to defy him.
With its vivid depictions of old New York and its enormously appealing characters, The Gilded Hour is a captivating, emotionally gripping novel that proves Sara Donati is an author at the height of her powers.
Members Reviews:
Historical romance, surgical implements too!
Is there anything you would change about this book?
Although I've never read a Sara Donati book, I see that she has quite a tidy list of previous novels. So it's probably safe to say that she and her publishers know what they are doing.
I am interested in how medicine was practiced back in the late 1800s, and this book served my curiosity well. First and foremost, this is a romance novel, with lots of randy scenes between the two main characters. Had this been the only draw, I'd have stopped my listen.
But this book is also a well-researched tome on women's role in medicine back in the Gilded Age. It also features forensic medicine, a la Kathy Reichs of "Bones" fame, at its brith. And there's more:
--it's an immigrant novel,
--it's a mixed race novel,
--it's a novel about prejudice, not just in terms of color, but in terms of country of origin, poverty, women, Catholics, Jews, cops, the wealthy, and, well...not much escapes.
--it's a novel about family and losing family,
--it's about the power of the church
--and, of course, the power of love.
What did you like best about this story?
I enjoy long books that give one a chance to deeply know the characters. Or, if the characters aren't all that well crafted, at least you get a good story. This is not a literary historical work, such as you might find with Kevin Baker's books about New York, but I found I enjoyed it a lot.
Which scene was your favorite?
I enjoyed the scenes having to do with the practice of medicine. In particular, I recall a very well-crafted scene of a surgeon demonstrating a gynecological procedure to a group of male medical students.
