The Book: The Doctor and the Diva, by Adrienne McDonnell

The Story: Sometimes I avoid certain historical fiction only because I feel like it tells the same story over and over.  This story, I have to say, was totally unique and unlike anything I had read before.

It is the early 1900’s and Erika (an opera singer looking to further her career) and her husband Peter have been trying to conceive since they got married.  A child really is all that Peter wants.  Erika is on-board, but as the story progresses, you  kind of start to see that she’d just as soon have a big opera career before she has a baby.

On a tip from Erika’s brother, they start to visit a fertility doctor, Dr. Ravell.  He’s had success helping couples get pregnant when they thought for sure that they could not.  He was practicing several cutting edge techniques, including invetro fertilization.  Who know that that that existed in the early 1900’s?  As the treatments progress,  Dr. Ravell discovers that Peter will never be able to have children but has found this out on the sly and doesn’t have the guts to tell the couple.  Here’s where he’s faced with a series of tough decisions.

All three of these characters, in fact, are faced with tough decisions.  They are these complicated people who are all just trying to do what is right, even when those things seem to counteract each other at every turn.

What I Thought: I kind of thought that this book was amazing.  I know that you guys know this about me, but nothing makes a book for me like good character development, and that was just incredible here.  Erika kind of goes from this meek, annoying starlet wanna-be to this real woman with real emotions going through a seriously tough situation.  I couldn’t help but put myself in her place.  The decision to have children and put aside all these dreams that you had for your life had to have been so hard and the author fleshes all that out perfectly.  Her struggles, her talent, her needs, they are all just laid out there and the reader is left to make the decision: is she seriously selfish or is she just doing what she thinks is right?

Same with Peter.  At first, he just seems like this controlling, obsessed husband, but as the book goes on you start to see his real heart: he is genuinely madly in love with his wife and just wants a family with her.  He makes some decisions that made me cringe, but even then, was he just doing what was right by his family?

For me, though, the most interesting character was Dr Ravell.  The author somehow takes this creeper of a doctor and turns him into a character that you just want to hug.  His skill at his job combined with his pure old loneliness made for a pretty bad combination for him as far as life decisions go.  Women were falling over themselves for him and he was lonely…. the choices he made may not have been the “right” ones, but the author made his loneliness so palpable that his sleeping with these random women seem alright and even good.  Watching him change and fight these deep battles within himself was probably my favorite part of this book.

Historical fiction is a totally tricky genre I think.  It can get so cheesy so fast.  From the author’s notes at the beginning and the end of the book, she put some serious research into these characters, even basing Erika on someone in her family tree.  As far as I can tell, this is her first novel and I have to say, I was totally impressed.  I’ll keep an eye on her and not hesitate for a minute to read her next novel.

Conclusion: I would recommend this without reservation to anyone except people that are currently struggling with infertility or have recently experienced a miscarriage.  I don’t want to spoil anything, but there are some pretty graphic scenes here and they made the pregnant lady in me cringe and cry a little bit.  Other than that, seriously good stuff.  Check it out.