Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 2015
Pages: 416
Rating: Recommend
Synopsis: In this stunning new historical novel inspired by true events, Kim van Alkemade tells the fascinating story of a woman who must choose between revenge and mercy when she encounters the doctor who subjected her to dangerous medical experiments in a New York City Jewish orphanage years before.
In 1919, Rachel Rabinowitz is a vivacious four-year-old living with her family in a crowded tenement on New York City’s Lower Eastside. When tragedy strikes, Rachel is separated from her brother Sam and sent to a Jewish orphanage where Dr. Mildred Solomon is conducting medical research. Subjected to X-ray treatments that leave her disfigured, Rachel suffers years of cruel harassment from the other orphans. But when she turns fifteen, she runs away to Colorado hoping to find the brother she lost and discovers a family she never knew she had.
Though Rachel believes she’s shut out her painful childhood memories, years later she is confronted with her dark past when she becomes a nurse at Manhattan’s Old Hebrews Home and her patient is none other than the elderly, cancer-stricken Dr. Solomon. Rachel becomes obsessed with making Dr. Solomon acknowledge, and pay for, her wrongdoing. But each passing hour Rachel spends with the old doctor reveal to Rachel the complexities of her own nature. She realizes that a person’s fate—to be one who inflicts harm or one who heals—is not always set in stone.
Lush in historical detail, rich in atmosphere and based on true events, Orphan #8 is a powerful, affecting novel of the unexpected choices we are compelled to make that can shape our destinies.
Review: I thought this was a good book until I started considering all the research that must have gone into it, and some of the creative events that happened. I flipped to the back of the book and that's when I read that the plot and characters were inspired events and circumstances that had actually happened to members of the author's family, long ago and far away. She had photographs and details about her family written in an extra chapter. It was fascinating.
This is thought-provoking and controversial at almost every turn.
I could have done without the "leave nothing to the imagination" lesbian sex details (and that's the reason this "only" gets a "recommend" rating), but I'm not one for reading about the details of sex regardless. Just not my thing. The theme of homosexuality itself didn't bother me, but the details did. So there you have it.
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