The Pull of the Stars Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Updated on October 9, 2026

Verdict: A tense, beautifully controlled three-day novel of a 1918 Dublin flu ward, with a sapphic love story at its heart that arrives late and ends in grief, held back for romance readers by that ending and by some of the most graphic childbirth scenes in mainstream fiction.

Best for: Readers who want literary historical fiction with a queer center, who can take medical detail and loss on the page, and who are reading for character and atmosphere rather than a happy ending.

Heat level: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5 — glimpses and kisses)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.8/5 — a 3.95 Goodreads average across 92,205 ratings, marked down for a romance that is brief and does not survive the book)

Tropes: Historical fiction, pandemic setting, nurse heroine, caretaking, hurt/comfort, forbidden love, class difference, found family on a ward, compressed timeline, no HEA.

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue is a standalone historical novel, published by Little, Brown in the US and Picador in the UK in July 2020, set over three days in a Dublin maternity ward for flu patients in 1918 — where nurse Julia Power, running the ward alone, is sent an untrained volunteer named Bridie Sweeney and a doctor the police are looking for, and finds her carefully regimented life knocked sideways by one of them.

It holds a 3.95 average across 92,205 Goodreads ratings, a starred Kirkus review calling it Donoghue’s best novel since Room, and a Giller Prize longlisting. It also has a love story that the trade coverage barely mentions and that some sapphic readers cannot forgive. Both of those facts are worth understanding before you start.

What Is The Pull of the Stars About?

The Pull of the Stars is literary, character-driven fiction first and a romance a distant second. It is set in Dublin at the end of the First World War, with the flu tearing through tenements and the Rising still an open wound, and Donoghue uses the setting’s full machinery: Catholic institutions, poverty, and a health system that has no idea what it is fighting. Dr Kathleen Lynn, a real historical figure, is one of the three central women.

Julia is almost thirty, unmarried, living with a brother who came back from the war unable to speak, and so competent at her job that she has more or less stopped noticing her own life. Bridie is everything she is not — raised in a Church-run institution, untrained, blunt, funny and hungry for the world. The book is told entirely in Julia’s first person across three days, which means the reader discovers what Bridie is to her at the same speed Julia does, and not a moment sooner.

What Makes This Sapphic Historical Novel Work

The pressure-cooker setting: One small ward, three beds, three days. Readers call it claustrophobic and gripping, and the New York Times review compares its pace to a thriller’s.
Bridie: The character readers name most often in the reviews. StoryGraph users rate the cast loveable at 87%, and the Julia–Bridie bond is what people remember.
The research: The medical and historical detail is praised almost universally — even readers who found it too much concede it is meticulous.
Timing: Written in 2018–19 and published in July 2020, it landed in the middle of a pandemic, and readers still describe it as uncannily current.
A queer love story in mainstream historical fiction: For readers who arrive expecting a nursing novel, the forbidden love between Julia and Bridie is the surprise — and the Lesbrary’s reviewer counts it as a genuine entry into f/f historical fiction.

Book Synopsis

Dublin, 1918. The war is winding down, the flu is not, and Nurse Julia Power has been given charge of a makeshift ward of three beds for pregnant women who have caught it. Staff are sick, supplies are short, and the public posters treat coughing as a moral failing. Julia runs the ward by rule and instinct, mostly alone.

On the first morning two strangers arrive. Dr Kathleen Lynn is a woman doctor rumoured to be a Rebel and wanted by the police, sent to fill a gap in a hospital running out of doctors. Bridie Sweeney is a volunteer sent up to help — no training, no family she will talk about, and a way of asking questions that Julia does not know how to answer. Between them they must keep women alive through fevers, haemorrhages and labours that come on without warning, in a room where the next patient can arrive faster than the last one leaves.

Over the three days, patients come and go and some of them do not leave. Julia learns where Bridie came from and what the institutions that raised her did to her, and starts to feel something she has no name for and no permission to feel. The question the book carries into its final act is not whether the ward will hold, but what Julia will be able to keep when the shift is over.

My Review

This is a superbly controlled novel, and I want to say that plainly before the caveats. Donoghue takes one room, three days and a handful of women and builds something that reads with the pace of a thriller and the weight of a history book. The birth scenes are tense the way action scenes are tense, and the flu is a real antagonist.

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue book cover

The second real strength is Bridie. She is funny, quick and unsentimental about her own damage, and she gives the book its warmth. Watching Julia — competent, contained, quietly lonely — start to notice her is lovely, and Donoghue writes their few moments alone with a restraint that makes them land hard. StoryGraph’s crowd marks it 86% emotional and 73% sad, and those numbers are earned.

Where it struggles, for this site’s readers specifically, is the romance itself. The two women know each other for three days, and several reviewers say the romantic turn arrived with no build-up, reading like a late plot twist rather than a thread. One reader calls it shoehorned into an already frantic story. Then there is the ending: romance.io tags the book “no HEA,” and at least one furious one-star reviewer files it under bury-your-gays. Around that sit the complaints that recur across the general readership: the childbirth is extremely graphic and constant, which led at least one reader to skim, and the dialogue carries no quotation marks, which irritates a steady minority. StoryGraph’s did-not-finish rate is just 2%, though — well under the 9% I flagged on Her Spell That Binds Me — so people who start this book finish it.

One expectation to reset: this is sold and reviewed as pandemic historical fiction, not sapphic romance — Kirkus calls the bond a budding friendship. That cuts both ways. If you came for a love story, calibrate — it is the heart of the book but not its engine, and it does not end happily. If you came for the history and are wary of romance, relax — the relationship is brief, gentle and never explicit.

My honest note: A near-great novel with a love story that is luminous and cruelly short. If you need your sapphic romance to end together, this will hurt you in exactly the way you are afraid of. If you can read it as historical fiction with a queer heart, it is one of the most gripping books of its kind.

Element	In The Pull of the Stars
Central relationship	Julia Power & Bridie Sweeney — a senior nurse and an untrained volunteer, strangers to lovers over three days
Core tropes	Pandemic setting, caretaking, hurt/comfort, forbidden love, class difference, compressed timeline
Setting	A three-bed flu maternity ward in a Dublin hospital, over three days in 1918
Heat level	1/5 — glimpses and kisses
Series	Standalone — no HEA for the central couple
Content notes	Graphic childbirth and medical trauma, miscarriage and stillbirth, infant and child death, pandemic illness and death, blood and gore, institutional child abuse, domestic abuse, religious bigotry, war trauma, death of a main character

How Dark and Spicy Is The Pull of the Stars?

A 1/5 on spice. romance.io does index the book — unusual for a literary title — and rates the steam “glimpses and kisses,” its lowest band, across 69 ratings. That matches every reader report I found: the intimacy between Julia and Bridie is tender and brief, and nothing is on the page beyond it. Nobody complains about the lack of heat.

Darkness is the real question, and here the book scores high. StoryGraph’s crowd-sourced warnings put medical content, death, child death, pregnancy, medical trauma, blood and miscarriage at the top of the graphic list, each flagged by between roughly 80 and 150 readers, and 40% of StoryGraph readers tag it dark. The childbirth is the thing most often named. If you want sapphic historical fiction with a similarly low heat, Affinity and The Night Watch sit in the same quiet band.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you read literary historical fiction for immersion, you can handle graphic medical detail, you want queer women written into a mainstream historical story, and you value a character like Bridie over a tidy resolution.

You may want to skip it if: childbirth, infant loss or pandemic illness on the page is too much for you, you need the central couple to end together, you want a slow build to a romance rather than a sudden one, or dialogue without quotation marks pulls you out of a book.

In short: an extraordinary historical novel and a heartbreaking sapphic love story, and the second part is why some readers never forgive the first.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

This is not a book riding a current wave. It is a six-year-old literary bestseller from the author of Room, with 92,205 Goodreads ratings, around 15,000 StoryGraph reviews and more than 14,000 Amazon ratings, and it keeps finding readers through book clubs and the historical-fiction shelf rather than through queer-romance channels. I could not check Reddit, which was unreachable from here, and TikTok’s hashtag pages would not load, so I cannot tell you what either platform is doing with it. The trade record is unusually strong: a starred Kirkus review that put it among its best books of 2020, praise from the New York Times, NPR and the Washington Post, a Giller Prize longlisting, and a Goodreads Choice nomination badge on its Amazon listing.

The audiobook is narrated by Emma Lowe for Picador and runs 9 hours and 5 minutes. Libro.fm’s listing highlights her distinct Irish accents, though at least one Goodreads listener says her attention kept wandering on audio.

Prefer audio? Listen to The Pull of the Stars on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): Bridie, first and most consistently — she appears in more of the popular Goodreads reviews than any other character, and readers describe the bond between her and Julia as the heart of the book. Then the pace: “gripping,” “compelling” and “like a thriller” recur in reader and trade reviews alike, and Amazon’s own review summary says the same. The research is praised almost universally, including Donoghue’s treatment of Kathleen Lynn. The pandemic timing still comes up constantly. The Lesbrary’s reviewer, who did not know the love story was coming, found it the book’s most delightful surprise.

What readers argue about and complain about: The childbirth, above everything. It is graphic, it is constant, and it is the complaint that turns up across two-, three- and four-star reviews alike — one reader likened it to a beginner’s guide to giving birth. Second, the romance — and it splits in two. General-fiction readers complain it had no build-up and felt shoehorned into three frantic days; sapphic readers object to how it ends, and one of the most detailed one-star reviews is built around bury-your-gays. The Lesbrary’s reviewer, by contrast, read the ending as difficult but not that trope, so the opinion genuinely divides. Third, the missing quotation marks, which two Goodreads reviewers in my sample and at least one blogger found actively annoying. Beyond that: bleakness, and a few readers who felt the pandemic parallels earned it more praise than the story did.

The standalone question worth asking first: it is complete in one volume, and nothing further is required. Spoiler for the ending: the relationship does not survive the book, and the one real consolation Donoghue offers Julia is not a romantic one. Within the author’s catalogue, this is her second-highest-rated major novel on Goodreads after Room (4.08), and it sits well above The Wonder (3.65). Her 2023 sapphic novel Learned by Heart is the obvious next step for queer readers, but it rates noticeably lower at 3.51 across about 10,000 ratings, and its first love is a quieter, more melancholy one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Pull of the Stars a lesbian romance?

Partly. It is historical fiction first, but the relationship between Julia and Bridie is romantic and central to the book’s emotional arc. romance.io tags it lesbian romance, while Kirkus describes it as a budding friendship.

Does The Pull of the Stars have a happy ending?

No, not for the couple. romance.io tags it “no HEA,” and one of the two women does not survive the book. Julia’s ending holds some hope, but it is not a romantic one.

How spicy is The Pull of the Stars?

A 1/5. romance.io rates it “glimpses and kisses,” its lowest band. The intimacy is brief, tender and never explicit.

Is The Pull of the Stars too graphic?

It can be. Childbirth, medical trauma, miscarriage and infant death are described in close detail, and they are the most common complaint in the reviews. StoryGraph readers flag medical content and child death as graphic more than any other warning.

Is there an audiobook of The Pull of the Stars?

Yes. It is narrated by Emma Lowe for Picador and runs 9 hours and 5 minutes. It is available on Audible and Libro.fm.

If You Loved The Pull of the Stars, Read These Next

The closest match in mood is Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch, another novel of women doing essential work in wartime, with love between them caught up in the crisis. If the post-war setting is what held you, The Paying Guests moves forward to 1922 London and keeps the same claustrophobic pressure. And for Donoghue herself writing a sapphic love story at the center rather than the margins, Learned by Heart is the natural companion.

For more in this register, browse our guide to lesbian historical fiction books, the list of the best sapphic books of all time, or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

The Pull of the Stars is a book whose craft outruns its comfort. The flu ward is an unforgettable setting, Bridie is one of the most vivid characters in recent historical fiction, and the pace holds from the first page to the last. It is also relentlessly graphic, its love story is compressed into three days, and it does not give its two women the ending a romance reader wants. Whether that trade is worth it depends on what you came for — but the reader who approaches it as historical fiction with a queer heart gets a gripping, moving, beautifully made novel. Check The Pull of the Stars on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, The Pull of the Stars ranks as a major literary historical novel with a sapphic heart — gripping and deeply felt, held back for romance readers by its brevity and its grief, and best approached for Bridie and the ward rather than for a love story that lasts.