Mad Dog, or rather Enzo, was raised to lead one of Ontario's multi-generational criminal gangs. Our narrator Jessica is his moll, latest in a long line of sweet but not swift cuties, who does as she's told and asks no questions. It's a precarious life, given that his previous molls all vanished when he got tired of them, and few know that better than Jessica's big sister, a respectable-looking accountant in Enzo's crime family, who is determined to make bank on Jessica's big eyes and bigger curves.
Jessica can cope with life under Enzo's strict rules; she's been under her sister's orders ever since she was old enough to sit still and listen. Her only escape was reading, living in her fantasies. At first, life with Enzo seems
like all her fantasies have come true: unlimited funds for vintage
clothing, gifts of jewelry, an extravagant apartment, even a chef who sends her meals tailored to her taste three
times a day. And the sea dragon, Enzo's first gift to her: a frilly seahorse that lives in
its own columnar aquarium.
Gradually Jessica comes to
understand how precarious her position really is, how dangerous her
boyfriend and his family are, and starts to think that maybe her sister is right: she
needs to build up an escape fund big enough to get her far far away
before Enzo makes her disappear the way her predecessors did. But when Enzo's scary mother comes to visit her, that's when things really get crazy.
The writing is crisp and the pace dances along like a conga line:
prim matrons and drunken revelers bobbing and flailing in several
directions at once. There’s always something happening or just happened,
and even though Jessica almost never sees anyone except her sister and
Enzo, ever more of the world outside becomes ever clearer to her and to the reader. It's all set up for a big, zany, gangland finish, and yes, there's a twist at the end that I didn't see coming even a few pages before.
This novel, set before World War I and written very much in the
style of books from that era, is literary rather than action-packed, and delves into early nursing training of the late 19th and early 20th century. Beth, the village school’s valedictorian, has great plans for her future:
she’s going to train to be a Nightingale! As in Florence Nightingale,
the mother of modern nursing practice. She gets a place at a London training hospital, a room at a boarding house, and far more exhausting work than she dreamed of.
The letters between Beth and her friend Tom, and later others, are an
often touching microcosm of the daily life of that era. Intermittent
quotes of poetry extant at that time are scattered through throughout,
thought of by Beth in the night or mentioned by other characters, sometimes
heading chapters to emphasize the theme. Little-known nursing history - and the origins of the order of Nightingale-trained nurses - finally gets its due through Emily's training, and via the thoughts, feelings, and actions of those around her in the field of medicine. The use of
omniscient point of view may be distracting for readers more used to
first person or close third.
Between Tom's world and Beth's, readers get the outline of social unrest in England the time, amid discussion about the state
of birth control and of women’s sexuality. We are also shown some of the
psychological and emotional stresses of the nursing profession. The phrase
“eating their young,” used back then, is still current in nursing today, where many
older, more experienced nurses still hand younger
nurses all the worst jobs, all the while scolding rather than encouraging, frowning rather than smiling, and generally making the workplace more exhausting than it needs to be. [This reviewer has also witnessed great mutual support among nurses in modern hospitals; if the times are changing in this regard, it's well overdue.]
With her training almost complete, Beth takes a practicum placement at a tuberculosis sanitarium and there meets the Canadian painter Emily Carr, a woman a bit older than herself, who is not yet famous and whose weakened body has betrayed her under the rigours of the British climate and her artist training. Their daily encounters cast light on the desperate and largely futile search for meaningful treatments for the dreaded TB, or 'consumption' as some still called it, and also on the continual emphasis on fresh air as a preventative against spreading the contagion to nursing staff or family visitors. There's a mystery around one patient that can only be solved by combining Emily's knowledge of paints with Beth's comprehensive recording of patient symptom patterns.
The novel's thorough nursing lore, both in England and amid the horrors of World War I's trench warfare, is a credit to the author, a longtime nurse and professor who has helped many a young student stay on course through the demanding training for the profession.
Recommended for those who like social history and anyone who wondered about the barely told story of doomed Ruby in the Anne of Green Gables books.
A Watch of Nightingales
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