THE LIGHT OF LUNA PARK

In 1926, at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, a young nurse sacrifices her career and later the love of her life to save a premature baby who will become her daughter.

“To qualify as a nurse, I must master it all,” Althea Anderson reflects of her profession’s scientific requirements. “But to serve as one, I must pretend I know none of it.” In 1926, in a male-dominated obstetrics ward, she sees premature babies, their parents typically poor, consigned to die because, as one doctor says, “It is not our place to question God’s plan,” even though a doctor in Coney Island is saving such infants daily by putting them in incubators...and displaying them as a sideshow to fund his initiative. Haunted by one child’s death in particular, Althea smuggles another newborn, who weighs a little over 2 pounds, out of the hospital and places her in the admirable care of Dr. Couney at Luna Park. “Live babies!” the barker tells the boardwalk crowd. “All the world loves a baby!” Inside, however, all is calm and competence, and Margaret thrives. And Althea’s life, already altered by a single act of mercy, becomes one of secrecy and sacrifice. “Love makes us do things we would not otherwise consider,” one character observes, and though the novel occasionally strays into such sentimental clichés, Althea remains an engaging and convincing heroine. As does Stella Wright, the novel’s other narrator. A young special education teacher in 1950, Stella confronts that era’s brand of male callousness and societal bigotry with its undercurrents of eugenics and racism. Still mourning her recently deceased mother and disturbed by her husband’s wartime PTSD, Stella is drawn back into her mother’s past, where true identities and destinies are deftly revealed. “She made me who I am,” Stella realizes, “and I need her help to figure out who I can become....”

A romantic yet historically evocative depiction of two pioneering women’s intertwined lives.