THE PATH BENEATH HER FEET

In this sequel, Daly continues the life story of the fictional Dr. Eliza Edwards in 1936, when she is 57 years old and financially struggling to maintain her medical practice.

Eliza and her partner, Dr. Olga Povitsky, have been practicing medicine together for 16 years, sharing their office (as well as Eliza’s house) in Boston. Now Olga, who’s found a position with the New York Department of Public Health, is retiring from private medicine. More dispiriting news is to come: Eliza has been separated from her husband, Harrison Shaw, for 17 years. After they attend the Naval Academy graduation ceremony of their younger son, Teddy, Harrison announces that he’s dying and wants a divorce—he wishes to marry the woman he’s loved for the past 12 years. Happily, a month later, as the couple finalize their divorce, Harrison presents Eliza with an opportunity that will set her on a new path. Kay Clark, the four-months pregnant daughter of a Black Chicago congressman, has contracted polio. Her father intends to send her to Warm Springs, Georgia, the treatment center made famous by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he wants an obstetrician to accompany Kay during her stay in Warm Springs and manage her care. Daly packs her melodramatic novel (continuing Eliza’s story from 2022’s The Unlocked Path) with historical details of the period, including the impending war, the Depression-era poverty, and the racial bigotry toward Kay that permeates the all-white enclave of Warm Springs. In riveting detail, Daly describes the dismissiveness with which Kay is treated (such as being banned from the main dining room and not allowed in the pool when white patients are using it), a daily diet of slights both large and small. (“Welcome to Georgia. Home of pecans, peaches, and petty peons,” Kay wryly observes.) The following year, Eliza expands her opportunities once again, opening a maternity center in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee. Daly vividly portrays the crippling poverty and lack of medical care, but also the physical beauty of the area and the warmth of the population.

A historically compelling, engaging ode to a cadre of formidable women.