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A review by brooke_review
Doctors and Friends by Kimmery Martin
3.0
Kimmery Martin’s new novel Doctors and Friends is gaining attention for being a story about a pandemic written before COVID-19 changed life as we knew it. Martin, a former emergency medical doctor, started her story about the fictional artiovirus in 2019, and I imagine she was just as surprised as the rest of us by what happened the following year. Her book Doctors and Friends details the relationships among a group of female doctors set against the backdrop of a global pandemic.
The similarities between Doctors and Friends and the real-life COVID-19 pandemic are staggering. It is almost hard to believe that Doctors and Friends was conceived before the COVID. From quarantine to vaccines, everything that we have been living through over the past few years is contained in this book. For some, it will hit too close to home and be “too much too soon,” but for someone like me who doesn’t mind stories that feel ripped from the headlines, Doctors and Friends was an informative journey into a pandemic told through the eyes of several prominent doctors.
While Doctors and Friends is verifiably eye-opening and affirming, I found that it majorly lacked one thing that I deem necessary for any novel written henceforth about a pandemic - heart. This book seriously lacked that emotional, heart-tugging connection that I believe readers who have now lived through their own pandemic will yearn for. Doctors and Friends is quite the dry, clinical take on a pandemic, and read more as a factual account of the virus’s effect on the world, as opposed to a resounding story of what we all have just lived through.
So depending on what you are looking for in a pandemic-themed novel, Doctors and Friends may or may not appeal to you. Want an educational narrative about what it is like to be a doctor in the midst of a pandemic void of emotion and drama? Then this is the book for you! Want something that will allow you to connect with a character living through a pandemic on a more personal, soul-searching level? Try Jodi Picoult’s Wish You Were Here instead.
The similarities between Doctors and Friends and the real-life COVID-19 pandemic are staggering. It is almost hard to believe that Doctors and Friends was conceived before the COVID. From quarantine to vaccines, everything that we have been living through over the past few years is contained in this book. For some, it will hit too close to home and be “too much too soon,” but for someone like me who doesn’t mind stories that feel ripped from the headlines, Doctors and Friends was an informative journey into a pandemic told through the eyes of several prominent doctors.
While Doctors and Friends is verifiably eye-opening and affirming, I found that it majorly lacked one thing that I deem necessary for any novel written henceforth about a pandemic - heart. This book seriously lacked that emotional, heart-tugging connection that I believe readers who have now lived through their own pandemic will yearn for. Doctors and Friends is quite the dry, clinical take on a pandemic, and read more as a factual account of the virus’s effect on the world, as opposed to a resounding story of what we all have just lived through.
So depending on what you are looking for in a pandemic-themed novel, Doctors and Friends may or may not appeal to you. Want an educational narrative about what it is like to be a doctor in the midst of a pandemic void of emotion and drama? Then this is the book for you! Want something that will allow you to connect with a character living through a pandemic on a more personal, soul-searching level? Try Jodi Picoult’s Wish You Were Here instead.